UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


WRITERS     OF     THE     DAY 

Genekal    Editoe;    Bertram    Christian 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


By  STEPHEN  QWYNN 


ROBERT  EMMETT:  A  Historical  Romanct 
THE  GLADE  IN  THE  FOREST 
FAIR  HILLS  OF  IRELAND 
CHARLOTTE  GRACE  O'BRIEN 
HOLIDAY  IN  CONNEMARA 
MEMORIALS  OF  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY 

PAINTERS 
STORIES  FROM  IRISH  HISTORY 


MRS.  HUMPHREY  WARD. 


MRS  HUMPHRY 
WARD 


By 

STEPHEN  GWYNN 


,        ... 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


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V 

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'1 
CONTENTS 


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1 


I.  Introductory    .... 
II.  Robert  Elsmere  .... 

III.  Novels  of  the  General  World 

4 

IV.  Helbeck  of  Bannisdalb  and  Eleanor 
V.  Novels  with  a  Historical  Basis 

VI.  The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell   . 
VII.  Later  Novels  and  General  Appre 

CIATION  .... 

Bibliography     .... 
American  Bibliography    , 
Index         


7 

17 
35 
61 
83 
98 

103 
121 
123 
125 


I  ' 


INTRODUCTORY 

IT  would  be  unfair  and  uncritical  to  say 
that  the  most  remarkable  point  about 
Mrs  Humphry  Ward  as  a  writer  is 
the  circulation  of  her  books.  What  is  true, 
what  ought  to  be  said  at  once,  is  that  without 
her  popular  vogue  the  attention  of  artists 
would  scarcely  have  been  attracted  to  her 
work.  Such  a  success  as  she  has  achieved 
and  consolidated  does  not  dictate  to  critical 
opinion,  but  it  compels  appraisement  to  be 
made.  Note  has  to  be  taken  of  the  fact  that 
Mrs  Ward  has  interested  persons  of  high 
intellectual  distinction,  from  Mr  Gladstone 
downwards ;  that  she  has  done  so  by  writ-  N 
ings  that  have  no  pretension  to  humour  or 
to  wit,  writings  which,  in  so  far  as  they  are 
love  stories,  lack  almost  entirely  the  quality 
of  suggesting  passion ;  writings,  too,  in  which 
the    most    sympathetic    reader   must    find 

7 


I 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


many  dull  pages.  It  has  to  be  noted,  in 
short,  that  she  has  succeeded  with,  all  the 
odds  against  her.  If,  as  I  think,  criticism 
has  so  far  turned  aside  from  the  task  of 
estimating  her  rank,  that  is  because  Mrs 
Ward  created  her  position  by  a  book  whose 
popularity  rested  on  qualities  apart  from  its 
literary  merits.  Robert  Elsmere  was  con- 
sidered less  as  a  novel  than  as  the  vehicle  for 
popularising  a  certain  range  of  ideas,  and  for 
that  reason  critical  opinion — which  is  some- 
what unduly  specialised — refused  to  consider 
it  seriously  either  as  a  novel  or  as  a  piece 
of  theological  controversy.  It  neglected  to 
consider  how  far  its  unquestioned  success 
was  a  success  of  literary  art. 

I  am  speaking  now  of  that  critical  opinion 
which  is  responsive  and  responsible  only  to 
the  craft  itself — which,  in  fact,  very  largely 
reflects  the  craft's  own  judgment — and 
which  is  always  a  little  prejudiced  against 
the  successful  artist  by  certain  aspects  of 
popularity.  The  admiration  of  those  who, 
admiring  Mrs  Ward,  admired  also  Miss 
Corelli,  was  in  this  respect  a  detrimental 

8 


INTRODUCTION 


asset.  Yet,  it  may  be  replied,  if  Mrs  Ward 
can  interest  fashionable  ladies  and  other  not 
very  intellectual  people  in  things  of  the 
mind  (as  undoubtedly  she  has  done),  that  is 
matter  for  praise :  unless  her  methods  can 
be  shown  to  be  illegitimate,  unless  she  has 
vulgarised  and  mutilated  the  thing  which 
she  delineates,  to  bring  it  down  to  facile 
comprehension.  I  do  not  think  such  a 
charge  could  be  sustained  for  a  moment. 
Highly  trained,  indefatigably  industrious, 
her  work  proves  her  to  be — and  not  only 
that,  but  fair  in  her  presentment  of  those 
attitudes  of  mind  which  are  not  her  own. 
The  devil's  advocate  before  the  tribunal  of 
art  would  be  obliged,  I  think,  to  limit  him- 
self to  this  indictment :  that  she  is  a  publicist 
rather  than  an  artist :  or  at  least  that  her 
success  was  the  success  of  a  publicist  rather 
than  of  an  artist,  and  that  even  with  develop- 
ing artistic  power  she  has  never  learnt  to 
subordinate  thoroughly  the  accidental  to 
the  essential  interests  of  her  craft.  It  is 
possible  to  represent  her  books  as  only 
one   or    two   degrees   removed   from    that 

9 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


ungenial  thing,  the  "  symposium ':  in  a 
review. 

People  talk  of  such  and  such  a  person 
having  "  had  no  advantages."  Mrs  Ward 
has  had  too  many  "  advantages  "  ;  they 
stand  in  her  way.  There  is  something  of 
the  child  in  every  artist,  and  it  is  hard  to 
find  in  most  of  Mrs  Ward's  books.  When 
you  find  it,  she  is  unconsciously  creative — 
working  in  a  wholly  different  mood.  Every 
page  that  she  writes  of  the  north  country 
(where  we  know  that  she  was  bred,  and  if 
we  did  not  know  we  could  infer  it)  tells 
simply  of  life  lived.  She  is  part  of  what 
she  writes  about,  is  one  with  it.  Every- 
where else  we  are  conscious  of  experience 
deliberately  pursued,  of  scenes  and  environ- 
ments intelligently  depicted,  but  no  more. 
She  can  describe  to  us  the  society  in  which 
most  of  her  working  life  has  presumably  been 
passed:    she  cannot  make  it  live. 

Herein  she  shows  inferior  to  so  true  yet  so 
pedestrian  an  artist  as  Trollope.  Trollope 
made  Barchester — made  it  out  of  his  own 
consciousness,  somehow  obscurely  informed. 

10 


INTRODUCTION 


It  lives,  it  is  all  of  a  piece,  it  has  an  atmos- 
phere which  conveys  itself:  he  does  not 
need  to  describe.  Or  take  a  closer  parallel. 
Trollope  was  probably  never  in  so  close 
touch  with  politicians  as  Mrs  Ward  has  been, 
yet  his  novels  of  parliamentary  life,  far  less 
technical  than  hers  in  their  method,  far  less 
shoppy  (if  one  may  be  permitted  the  phrase), 
nevertheless  catch,  as  hers  do  not,  the 
spirit  of  the  institution  as  we  know  it  to-day, 
despite  the  passage  of  nearly  two  genera- 
tions and  far-reaching  change.  The  differ- 
ence is  that  Trollope  is  interested  primarily 
in  men  and  women,  in  the  rough  lump  of 
humanity;  Mrs  Ward  is  preoccupied  with 
special  types,  with  their  ideas,  and  their 
setting,  social  or  historic. 

In  one  sense  Mrs  Ward  has  a  better  right 
than  most  novelists  to  be  named  with 
Trollope.  Her  survival  is  assured,  like  his, 
for  the  purposes  of  history.  The  historian 
seeking  to  construct  a  picture  of  the  last 
hundred  years  will  find  his  best  resource 
(far  better  than  the  newspapers  can  afford) 
in  certain  novelists,  persons  of  normal  mind : 

11 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


such  pre-eminently  was  Trollope.  Take, 
for  example,  one  of  his  least  known  works, 
The  MacDermots  of  Ballycloran :  it  is  like 
the  report  of  the  Devon  Commission  drama- 
tised and  focused  upon  a  particular  locality. 
He  saw  Ireland  with  the  mind  of  a  jury. 
And  if  a  Royal  Commission  had  been  in- 
stituted to  report  upon  the  life  of  the  country 
clergy  and  the  more  devout  among  their 
well-to-do  parishioners,  who  can  doubt  but 
that  the  evidence  and  the  findings  would 
have  left  an  impression  which  could  be  well 
summed  up  in  the  novels  of  Miss  Yonge  ? 
These  two  artists  (no  candid  mind  can  deny 
that  title  to  Miss  Yonge)  presented  the  mode 
of  middle-class  living  in  their  day,  in  a  way 
that  will  help  the  historian — to  whom 
Stevenson  or  Meredith  will  be  of  singularly 
little  service.  Mrs  Ward  also  will  go  down 
to  posterity  as  the  writer  who  has  known 
how  to  dramatise  in  an  interesting  fashion, 
not  so  much  the  life  as  the  intellectual 
tendencies  of  her  own  generation.  The 
historian  will  turn  to  her  to  understand  not 
what  people  were  like,  what  they  did,  what 

12 


INTRODUCTION 


they  did  not  do,  how  they  judged  of  conduct, 
but  rather  (in  an  age  much  marked  by 
speculation)  what  they  thought  about.  You 
will  gather  from  Meredith  what  Meredith 
loved  and  laughed  at,  from  Stevenson  what 
Stevenson  liked  men  to  do  or  to  be.  But 
Mrs  Ward  dispassionately,  or  at  least  with 
scrupulous  generosity,  sets  out  for  us  the 
opinions  current  in  her  time  upon  high 
matters  of  general  concern. 

The  competence  of  her  equipment  is  not 
to  be  disputed.  Granddaughter  to  Arnold 
of  Rugby,  niece  to  Matthew  Arnold,  she  was 
brought  up  in  close  touch  with  ruling  powers 
both  in  the  moral  and  in  the  intellectual 
sphere.  She  was  one  of  a  family  in  which 
every  individual  possessed  the  power  and 
the  inclination  to  write.  Over  and  above 
this,  her  father,  Professor  T.  Arnold,  was 
among  the  men  who  felt  the  Oxford  Move- 
ment at  its  strongest.  He  j  oined  the  Church 
of  Rome,  and,  being  a  fine  critic  of  literature, 
went  with  Newman  to  help  in  founding  a 
Catholic  University  in  Ireland.  But  his 
mind  never  reached  a  final  poise  on  the 

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MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


questions  of  faith  which  preoccupied  him. 
Mrs  Ward  was  reared  in  an  atmosphere  of 
intense  spiritual  unrest:  theological  con- 
troversy must  have  been  in  the  air  she 
breathed,  and  not  alone  in  the  air  of  her 
home.  From  1865  to  1881  her  abode  was  at 
Oxford.  She  came  there  a  girl  of  fourteen, 
married  there  at  the  age  of  twenty-one, 
and  lived  there  for  nine  years  as  a  young 
married  woman.  During  all  this  period, 
Jowett  on  one  side,  Liddon  upon  the  other, 
were  at  the  full  tide  of  their  influence. 
Behind  these  protagonists  there  were  ap- 
paritions from  time  to  time  of  Pusey  on  the 
side  of  authority,  and,  on  the  other,  of  Mark 
Pattison,  reinforcing  the  armoury  of  de- 
structive criticism.  Mrs  Ward  was  a  keen 
student  of  literature  and  of  history  at  its 
sources,  but  the  special  bent  of  her  mind 
showed  itself  in  an  early  application  to  what 
she  herself  calls  "  the  general  literature  of 
modern  religion,"  and  her  first  important 
publication  was  a  translation  of  Amiel's 
'  Journal  Intime — the  self-revelation  of  a 
religious  soul  in  difficulties. 

14 


INTRODUCTION 


From  these  academic  surroundings  she 
removed  to  London.  As  the  wife  of  a  leader- 
writer  and  art  critic  on  a  great  newspaper, 
she  was  in  touch  with  the  most  prominent 
intellectual  personages  of  the  moment. 
More  than  that,  in  a  period  of  violent 
political  excitement,  her  uncle,  W.  E. 
Forster,  was  a  veritable  storm-centre;  her 
cousin,  Arnold  Forster,  was  entering,  under 
the  Irish  Secretary's  guidance,  on  a  political 
career  of  high  promise.  In  1888  her  own 
blazing  success  with  Robert  Elsmere  made  her 
a  personage:  it  brought  affluence  as  well. 
Thus  throughout  her  career,  keenly  interested 
in  all  the  vital  movements  of  her  time,  she  has 
been  almost  officially  at  the  centre  of  things. 
Her  contact  with  politics  has  been  that 
of  a  minister  or  ex-minister;  her  contact 
with  art,  that  of  a  Royal  Academician;  her 
contact  with  literature,  that  of  an  Oxford 
don. 

These  things  do  not  make  a  writer,  but 
at  least  they  ensured  that  if  she  wrote  a 
novel  about  politics,  or  about  art,  or  about 
theology,  she  was  fully  competent,  say,  to 

15 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


give  University  Extension  lectures  upon  the 
subject  with  which  she  dealt.  She  had  not 
been  a  parson  in  trouble  about  his  faith,  nor 
an  active  politician,  nor  an  artist  with  his 
bread  to  earn ;  but  she  knew  as  much  as 
books  could  tell  her  about  the  distinctive 
problem  of  each,  and  in  each  case  she  was 
personally  well  acquainted  with  distinguished 
living  examples  of  the  type  she  studied. 
Thus  her  work,  produced  at  a  period  when 
people  were  strongly  disposed  to  derive  part 
of  their  culture  from  the  more  serious  class 
of  fiction,  had  a  high  educational  value ; 
she  was  both  qualified  and  predisposed  to 
instruct.  Also,  and  this  was  essential  to 
her  success,  she  had  as  much  of  the  true 
story-teller's  gift  as  sufficed  to  win  and  hold 
her  audience. 


16 


A 


II 

RORERT  ELSMERE 

WKITER'S  early  attempts  are  often 
instructive,  and  Mrs  Ward's  first 
novel  showed  all  the  superficial 
characteristics  of  her  manner.  To  begin 
with,  Miss  Bretherton  had  the  attribute  of 
associating  itself  inevitably  with  an  actual 
personage — in  that  case  a  living  actress,  Miss 
Mary  Anderson.  Mrs  Ward  has  always 
steadily  insisted  on  the  right  to  find  in  fact 
a  starting-point  for  fiction,  a  suggestion 
which  the  artist  may  develop.  In  another 
respect  the  choice  of  subject  was  character- 
istic, since  it  admitted  of  being  stated  as  an 
abstract  intellectual  formula.  The  book 
might  have  been  written  in  answer  to  an 
examination  question  put  somewhat  thus: 
"  If  an  actress  of  high  ambition,  but  destitute 
of  training,  makes  a  dazzling  success  by 
sheer  beauty,  what  is  likely  to  be  her 
b  17 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


evolution  ? "  And  the  answer  given  in 
Mrs  Ward's  thesis-novel  reveals  a  third 
trait  destined  to  mark  all  her  work.  Miss 
Bretherton  owes  the  salvation  of  her  artistic 
soul  to  the  fact  that  she  has  come  in  touch 
with  persons  of  what  is  sometimes  called  the 
highest  culture.  It  is  an  obsession  with 
Mrs  Ward  that  there  exists  somewhere  (at 
the  top)  a  distinctive  society,  admission 
into  which  may  be  simply  represented  as  an 
assay  or  proof  of  fitness  (it  is  so  in  one  of  her 
later  novels,  Canadian  Born),  but  is  more 
commonly  treated  by  her  as  a  ripening  and 
perfecting  experience.  In  almost  all  her 
later  books  her  characters  either  belong  to 
this  charmed  circle  or  come  within  its  outer 
ambit — to  be  attracted  or  repulsed,  accord- 
ing to  the  measure  of  their  deserts.  Her  con- 
ception of  this  inner  or  upper  society  has  no 
doubt  been  amplified  and  glorified  since  she 
wrote  Miss  Bretherton ;  as  distinguishing 
marks  of  its  citizens,  knowledge  of  the  world, 
familiarity  with  power,  have  come  to  receive 
rather  more  emphasis  than  easy  converse 
with  the  best  in  books;  but,  from  first  to 

18 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


last  there  is  present  to  her  mind  a  distinction, 
if  not  between  the  initiated  and  the  un- 
initiated, at  least  between  those  capable  and 
incapable  of  initiation.  The  young  beauty- 
is  changed  from  a  bad  actress  into  a  good 
one  by  making  acquaintance  with  an  Oxford 
don  who  writes. 

Still,  in  Mrs  Ward's  later  work  the  moral 
efiect  of  this  contact  is  not  put  so  crudely  in 
terms  of  educational  influence  as  in  Miss 
Bretherton.  In  truth,  the  interesting  thing 
about  this  first  book  is  its  lack  of  quality. 
It  showed,  one  would  have  said,  a  deplor- 
able competence — ability  to  furnish  out 
something  that  fitted  all  the  orthodox 
formulae.  A  woman  so  well  trained,  who 
could  write  so  well,  had  seen  so  many  places 
and  people,  and  yet  who  could  give  neither 
atmosphere  nor  life,  seemed  indeed  a  case  to 
despair  of.  Yet  within  two  years  she  had 
written  Robert  Elsmere,  which  beyond  all 
doubt  has  life,  and  here  and  there  has 
atmosphere. 

Life  it  has,  poignant  life,  in  the  central 
chapters  which  relate  the  actual  struggle 

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MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


of  Elsmere's  choice,  whether  he  shall  or  shall 
not  renounce  his  orders.  They  culminate, 
when  the  choice  has  been  made,  in  the  story 
of  slight  incidents  which  render  delay  un- 
bearable to  him,  his  quest  of  one  man's 
fortifying  sympathy  and  then — the  climax 
— the  avowal  to  hie  Puritan  dale-bred  wife. 
In  that  chapter  and  the  next,  which  describe 
Catherine's  frantic  impulse  of  flight  and  her 
dazed  penitent  return,  Mrs  Ward  reached 
a  point  which  she  has  never  surpassed, 
perhaps  never  again  quite  reached ;  and  this 
assuredly  is  no  dispraise.  She  has  not  the 
gift  that  seems  to  burn  away  superfluous 
words  till  none  is  left  but  the  essential 
utterance ;  yet  passion  is  there,  the  struggle, 
the  strain,  and  out  of  passion  the  unspeak- 
able relief  in  reconciliation  achieved.  It  is 
the  only  passion  that  she  knows,  the  passion 
of  souls  perplexed  between  intellectual  or 
moral  faith  and  the  drag  of  their  humanity 
— a  passion  singularly  austere  and  unsensu- 
ous,  with  affinities  to  the  landscape  which 
is  never  far  from  this  writer's  mind.  What 
there  should  be  of  coldness  in  those  fells 

20 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


and  becks  and  dales,  I  cannot  tell;  but 
Wordsworth's  temper  enshrines  it,  and  Mrs 
Ward  is  of  the  same  lineage.  If  she  can 
understand  Catherine,  the  woman  of  little 
reading,  of  convictions  so  set  and  limited 
that  they  narrow  even  her  heart,  it  is  because 
Catherine  embodies  that  austere  spirit  of  the 
fells,  Puritanism  of  the  mountains  and  the 
glassy  Westmoreland  streams.  Catherine, 
not  Elsmere,  is  the  true  centre  of  the  book : 
she  is  a  life ;  he  is  little  more  than  a  bundle 
of  ideas,  tendencies  and  attributes.  Where 
he  becomes  vital,  he  catches  life  and  signi- 
ficance from  her. 

That  is  the  atmosphere  which  I  find  in  this 
book — the  atmosphere  of  one  place,  of  one 
person  only.  Mrs  Ward  details  with  love 
and  with  knowledge  all  the  charms  of 
southern  English  landscape — though  here, 
as  everywhere,  she  draws  out  too  long  her 
descriptive  passages,  and  mars  even  the 
chapters  of  which  I  have  spoken  with  an 
excessive  elaboration  of  sights  and  sounds 
upon  the  heath  where  Elsmere  paused  before 
his  fateful  home-coming.     If  she  does  not 

21 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


smother  her  northern  landscapes,  it  is  only 
because  the  feeling  behind  them  is  too  much 
alive.  Much  could  be  spared,  no  doubt,  yet 
the  superfluities,  too,  have  the  touch  of 
inspiration.  In  the  early  chapters,  which 
depict  the  life  of  Whindale,  one  perceives 
still  the  prentice  hand.  Mrs  Ward  strives 
after  humour,  a  grace  denied  her,  and  the 
result  is  triviality ;  but  how  wisely  she  learnt 

.  her  lesson !  I  cannot  recall  in  her  later 
works  any  effort  for  a  laugh.  Her  gift  was 
so  to  impassion  herself  in  following  the 
struggles  of  a  conscience  that  she  could  com- 
municate her  own  interest  in  an  adventure 
half  spiritual,  half  intellectual.  That  is 
where  she  is  an  artist.  What  matters  to 
the  artist  is  Catherine's  grip  on  Robert, 
Robert's  on  Catherine — the  effort  of  two 
souls  bound  by  mortal  love  to  retain  close 
touch  of  one  another  when  their  most  vital 
beliefs  run  counter.     But — there  is  also  the 

•  publicist  to  be  reckoned  with.  The  publicist 
is  persistent  to  expound  exactly  what 
Elsmere  believed,  why  he  came  to  believe  it, 
and  what  expression  his  belief  found  in 

22 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


action.  All  this  appeals  to  a  curiosity,  or  a 
faculty,  which  is  not  the  faculty  that  art 
affects.  If  Mrs  Ward  had  needed  to  expound 
Catherine  as  she  expounds  her  husband,  the 
book  could  never  have  lived. 

In  other  words,  where  Mrs  Ward  suc- 
ceeded  best,    where   she   was   most   truly 
creative,    most   instinctive,    and   most    an 
artist,  was  where  she  was  least  a  propa- 
gandist.    The  creative  gift  was  there,  but 
not  in  higher  measure  than  could  be  matched 
bv  half-a-dozen  other  women  novelists  of  her 
generation.     What  distinguished  her,  what 
made  her  unique,  what  gave  her  a  real  im- 
portance, was  the  fact  that  she  made  this 
gift  subserve  the  purposes  of  an  intelligence 
deliberately  bent  to  the  task  of  moulding  and 
directing  contemporary  thought.     Her  novel 
was  in  its  germ  a  pamphlet— a  pamphlet 
written  in  answer  to  a  sermon.     Was  there 
ever  a  more  unlikely  beginning  for  a  vast 
popular  success  ?    Bare  qualities  were  needed 
for  her  task,  and  the  first  was  a  store  of 
true  knowledge.     But  knowledge  of  itself 
will  not  affect  feeling,  and  without  feelmg 

23 


MBS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


such  a  success  is  impossible.  Emotion 
must  be  raised  by  emotion ;  and  there  was 
passion  in  this  book — a  noble  passion  for 
freedom  of  the  mind,  a  zeal  for  the  rights  of 
knowledge.  The  history  of  its  genesis,  which 
has  been  told  by  herself  in  the  introduction 
prefixed  to  the  first  volume  of  the  "West- 
moreland Edition"  of  her  collected  novels, 
deserves  to  be  reproduced. 

To  use  her  own  words,  Mrs  Ward,  in  the 
first  nine  years  of  her  married  life,  "  got 
through  a  good  deal  of  reading  and  writing 
of  a  rather  various  kind,  concerned  now  with 
English,  now  with  French,  now  with  Spanish 
literature."  The  modesty  of  this  statement 
is  revealed  by  the  fact  that  in  1879  Dr  Wace, 
seeking  for  contributors  to  the  Dictionary 
of  Christian  Biography,  applied  to  this  quite 
young  woman  for  articles  dealing  with  "  the 
West  Goths  and  Spanish  Christianity  gener- 
ally up  to  800  a.d."  This  application  was 
suggested  by  "  some  articles  on  Spanish 
chronicles"  already  contributed  by  her  to 
The  Saturday  Review.  Of  the  task  to  which 
Dr  Wace  thus  set  her,  she  says : 

24 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


"  The  two  years  of  labour  among  the  docu- 
ments of  the  early  Spanish  Church  arjd  the 
West  Gothic  kingdom,  aided  at  every  step 
by  German  criticism  and  research,  were  the 
determining  years  of  my  life.     Practically 
I  have  described  them  and  their  effect  on  the 
mind  in  Robert  Elsmere.     Elsmere,  setting 
himself  to  work  on  the  origins  of  modern 
^France,  is  confronted  with  the  fact  that 
'contemporary  record   is    coloured   by   the 
personal  bias  and  training  of  the  recorder, 
and  that  this  bias  and  training  is  a  leading 
part  of  the  circumstances  of  the  time. 

"  The  astonishment  awakened  in  Elsmere, 
as  his  task  develops,  by  those  strange  pro- 
cesses of  mind  current  in  the  histories  of 
certain  periods,  processes  which  are  often 
more  interesting  and  illuminating  than  the 
facts^ which  the  historians  are  trying  to  relate, 
was  in  truth  my  own  astonishment.     After 
some  fourteen  years  spent  at  Oxford  in  a 
more    or    less    continuous,   though    always 
desultory,  study  of  English  poetry,  French 
belles   lettres    and   what   one   may  call   the 
general  literature  of  modern  religion,  the 
Acta  of  Spanish  Councils  and  the  chronicles 
and  hagiography  of  the  West  Gothic  King- 
dom produced  in  me,  beside  the  immediate 

25 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


historical  result,  a  kind  of  far-reaching  stir 
and  rumination,  if  one  may  so  put  it,  which 
gradually  affected  the  whole  mind.  And 
it  was  this  stir  and  rumination  which,  six 
years  later,  I  endeavoured  to  reproduce  in 
Robert  Elsmere" 

Another  element  in  her  life  which  reflected 
itself  in  the  book  was  the  influence  of  Mark 
Pattison — who,  as  she  says,  "  was  always 
interested  in  the  young  girl  students  of 
Oxford,  tried  to  help  them,  and  set  a  standard 
before  them."  It  was  an  exacting  standard 
of  knowledge,  of  sustained  and  continuous 
endeavour — of  "Benedictine  application,"  to 
borrow  the  phrase  used  concerning  another 
of  these  brilliant  disciples,  Mark  Pattison' s 
young  wife,  afterwards  Lady  Dilke.  To 
the  squire,  who  represents  in  Elsmere' s 
history  the  sapping  force  of  criticism,  Mrs 
Ward  has  admittedly  given  Pattison' s 
exterior  traits,  and  has  no  doubt  suggested 
the  character  of  his  intellectual  attack.  It 
is  curious  and  not  a  little  ironical  to  reflect 
that  the  effects  of  the  great  scholar's  long 
labour,  so  barren  of  direct  results,  may  have 

26 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


been  chiefly  felt  at  second  hand,  transmitted 
through  this  casual  discipleship,  and  that 
this  acrid,   domineering  combatant,   in  so 
far  as  he  conquered,  may  have  conquered 
most  through  a  woman.     But  this  at  least 
emerges  as  a  certainty.     Mrs  Ward's  two 
years  of  work,  years,  as  she  puts  it,  "of 
serious  consecutive  training,  both  in  writing 
and    thinking,"    strengthened    in    her   the 
esprit  de  corps  and  gave  her  the  sense  of 
belonging  to  a  regiment  and  the  instinct  of 
loyalty  to  its  captains.     The  emotion  which 
is  felt  throughout  Robert  Elsmere  first  found 
expression  as  a  direct  retort  to  the  arraign- 
ment of  those  whom  a  Bampton  Lecturer 
held  responsible  for  "  the  present  unsettle- 
ment   in  religion. "     From  the  University- 
pulpit  in  St  Mary's  Church,  Dr  John  Words- 
worth, then  Fellow  and  Tutor  of  Brasenose 
College,    afterwards    Bishop    of    Salisbury, 
expounded,  in  1881,  his  thesis  that  "  Christ 
connects  unbelief  and  sin,"   and  specified 
among  the  sins  to  which  unbelief  was  attri- 
butable, "  indolence,  coldness,  recklessness, 
pride  and  avarice." 

27 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


I  remember,"  writes  Mrs  Ward, 


u 


"  gazing  from  the  dim  pews  under  the 
gallery  where  the  Masters'  wives  sit,  at  the 
fine  ascetic  face  of  the  preacher,  with  his 
strong  likeness  to  his  great-uncle,  the  poet 
of  English  pantheism,  and  seeing  beside  it 
and  around  it  the  forms  of  those,  his 
colleagues  and  contemporaries,  the  patient 
scholars  and  thinkers  of  the  Liberal  host 
whom  he  was  in  truth,  though  not  perhaps 
consciously,  attackiug.  My  heart  burned 
within  me,  and  it  sprang  into  my  mind  that 
the  only  way  to  show  England  what  was  in 
truth  going  on  in  its  midst  was  to  try  and 
express  it  concretely — in  terms  of  actual  life 
and  conduct.  Who  and  what  were  the 
persons  who  had  either  provoked  the  present 
unsettlement  of  religion,  or  were  suffering 
under  its  effects  ?  What  was  their  history  ? 
How  had  their  thoughts  and  doubts  come  to 
be,  and  what  was  the  effect  of  them  on 
conduct  ? " 

So  was  born  a  book  whose  publication 
should  undoubtedly  be  marked  as  an 
event — though  an  event  in  quite  another 
sense  than,  say,  the  publication  of  Richard 

28 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


Feverel.  Mrs  Ward  was  perhaps  providen- 
tially saved  from  forestalling  her  effect.  In 
the  heat  of  her  offended  loyalty  she  wrote  a 
protesting  pamphlet  entitled  Unbelief  and 
Sin,  in  which  she  says:  "  I  tried  to  sketch 
two  types  of  character,  A  and  B,  the  one 
carried  by  history  and  criticism  into  '  un- 
belief,' the  other  gradually  stifling  in  him- 
self the  instincts  and  power  of  the  free  mind." 
The  Oxford  bookseller  who  printed  it 
omitted  to  give  any  printer's  name,  and 
within  a  few  hours  a  High  Church  opponent 
detected  this  fact,  and  pointed  out  that  the 
omission  made  publication  an  illegal  act. 
The  pamphlet  was  withdrawn,  but  its  writer's 
imagination  did  nob  cease  to  work  on  the 
subject  which  was  "  always  hovering  in  the 
mind." 

This  long  unconscious  and  half-conscious 
cerebration  has  perhaps  preceded  the  birth 
of  most  good  novels ;  and  it  is  perfectly 
compatible  with  other  work.  In  these  years 
Mrs  Ward  tried  her  hand  with  Miss 
Bretherton,  but  her  translation  of  Amiel's 
Journal  had  a  closer  relation  to  the  larger 

29 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


theme,  for,  by  her  own  account,  many  of 
Amiel's  traits  were  diligently  reproduced  in 
Langham,  Elsmere's  sceptic  friend.  It  may 
be  noted,  however,  that  Oxford  of  the 
eighties  was  more  inclined  to  see  in  Langham 
some  reproduction  of  the  Balliol  tutor,  R.  L. 
Nettleship,  a  delicate  and  subtle  intelligence, 
strangely  fenced  about  by  shyness.  But  the 
captain  of  the  Liberal  host  to  whom  Mrs 
Ward  most  openly  proclaimed  her  devotion 
was  T.  H.  Green,  Professor  of  Moral  Phil- 
osophy, whose  published  words  are  actually 
put  into  the  mouth  of  Grey,  Elsmere's 
monitor  and  comforter.  Green  died  in 
1882,  but  his  memory  was  still  warmly 
cherished  and  the  power  of  his  influence 
still  felt,  when  Mrs  Ward  began,  in  1885,  to 
write  her  book,  placing  some  of  her  scenes 
in  the  landscape  of  that  "  beautiful  wild 
land"  about  Hindhead  in  which,  from  1882 
onwards,  her  summers  had  been  spent.  Not 
till  the  end  of  1887  was  it  finished:  it 
appeared  at  the  close  of  February,  1888,  and 
before  April  was  over  had  reached  a  third 
edition.     In  May  Mr  Gladstone,  then  at  the 

30 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


very  zenith  of  his  amazing  prestige,  reviewed 
it  in  The  Nineteenth  Century.  The  article 
was  a  compliment,  all  the  more  impressive 
because  it  went  far  beyond  the  old-world 
courtesy  which  was  to  be  expected  from  the 
great  veteran,  when  he  spoke  of  a  lady  and 
an  Arnold.  His  praise  of  her  literary  gift 
might  lend  itself  to  the  observation  that 
.he  commended  specially  a  copiousness  in 
which  he  himself  was  over-abundant :  but 
none  could  dispute  the  authority  with 
which  he  commended  "  the  sense  of  mission, 
the  generous  appreciation  of  what  is  morally 
good,  impartially  exhibited."  Here  was  a 
noble  quality,  nobly  praised  by  one  who 
spoke  with  all  the  more  weight  because  none 
more  clearly  recognised  and  condemned  Mrs 
Ward's  aim,  which  was,  in  Mr  Gladstone's 
definition,  "  to  expel  the  preternatural 
element  from  Christianity,  to  destroy  its 
dogmatic  structure,  and  yet  to  keep  intact 
the  moral  and  spiritual  results."  In  the 
long,  controversial  pages  of  the  review  the 
old  Churchman  set  out  to  prove  the  impossi- 
bility of  this  ideal,  and  he  attributed  Mrs 

31 


MKS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


Ward's  acceptance  of  the  German  critical 
conclusions  to  an  imperfect  study  of  the 
rebutting  case  made  by  such  apologists  as 
Westcott. 

Later  in  the  year  Dr  Randall  Davidson, 
then  Dean  of  Windsor,  now  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury,  renewed  the  attack  on  Mrs 
Ward's  intellectual  preparation.  Yet  here 
again  the  adverse  critic  paid  deferential 
homage,  not  to  the  book's  success,  but  to  its 
high  merit,  its  power  of  commanding  and 
sustaining  interest.  To  these  high  disput- 
ants, and  to  the  host  of  her  controversial 
critics,  Mrs  Ward  made  answer  indirectly. 
In  some  very  charming  pages  of  the  West- 
moreland Edition,  which  recount  her  con- 
versations held  with  Mr  Gladstone  before 
his  review  was  written,  she  admits  that 
"  feminine  courage "  quailed  before  the 
flashing  eye  and  "  deep,  thunderous  voice  v 
which  blew  aside  the  "  trumpery  objections  " 
of  Renan  and  the  Germans :  nor  did  she,  in 
her  own  person,  so  to  say,  stand  up  to  him 
in  print.  But  The  Nineteenth  Century  of 
January,  1889,  contained  a  "  dialogue"  by 

32 


ROBERT  ELSMERE 


her  entitled  The  New  Reformation,  in  which 
a  chosen  spokesman  uttered  her  mind  as  to 
Westcott  and  his  fellow-champions.  They 
demanded,  she  said,  that  criticism  should 
apply  itself  in  a  special  manner,  with  strong 
prepossessions,  under  the  influence  of 
"  affection,"  to  the  records  of  Christianity's 
beginning.  But  unfettered  modern  thought 
demanded  an  equal  vigilance,  an  impartial 
survey,  over  the  whole  religious  field. 

Further  than  this  it  would  be  foreign  to 
our  purpose  to  follow  Mrs  Ward  in  contro- 
versy; but  a  word  should  be  said  as  to 
the  title  of  this  expository  dialogue,  which 
she  reprinted  in  her  collected  edition. 
"Reformation,"  in  Mrs  Ward's  sense,  as  it 
operated  in  England,  was  not  a  schism 
from  the  Church  :  rather,  it  transformed  the 
Church  in  reforming  it.  Devoted  as  she  is 
to  the  English  ideal  of  tradition  reconciled 
with  growth,  this  is  evidently  to  her  mind 
one  of  the  glories  of  England's  history. 
Robert  Elsmere  is  a  demand  for  a  new  mani- 
festation of  the  same  English  spirit:  and 
more  than  that,  she  feels  herself,  in  urging  it, 
0  33 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


to  be  the  heir  of  her  progenitor.  "  Arnold, 
the  great  leader  whom  the  Liberals  lost  in 
'42 — snatched  from  life  at  the  height  of 
bodily  and  spiritual  vigour — in  the  very 
birth-hour  of  the  New  Learning.  .  .  .  Arnold 
was  a  devoutly  orthodox  believer,  but  a 
Church  of  free  men,  coextensive  with  the 
nation,  gathering  into  one  fold  every  English- 
man, woman  and  child — that  was  Arnold's 
dream."  These  words,  taken  from  The 
Case  of  Richard  Meynell,  a  book  written  by 
her  more  than  twenty  years  later,  describe 
the  dream  which  inspired  Arnold's  grand- 
daughter in  writing  Robert  Elsmere,  and 
which  has  been  the  ruling  principle  alike 
of  her  Modernist  Anglicanism  and  of  her 
Anglican  Imperialism. 


34 


Ill 

NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 

r\OBERT  ELSMERE,  Mrs  Ward's 
f^  second  book,  was  published  in  her 
<-*-  ^  thirty-seventh  year.  It  was  to  be  ex- 
pected that  with  fully  matured  talent  and  ex- 
perience she  would  become  more  of  a  novelist 
and  less  of  an  expositor.  Yet  The  History 
of  David  Grieve,  the  book  which  followed 
Robert  Elsmere,  though  separated  from  it  by 
an  interval  of  no  less  than  four  years,  was 
scarcely  less  expository  than  its  predecessor, 
and  was  so  with  less  excuse.  No  dramatic  - 
conflict  hinges  on  the  question  of  David 
Grieve' s  belief  or  unbelief:  the  merits  of  the 
story  exist  in  spite  of  the  author's  attempt  to 
show  what  a  good  man,  spiritually  minded, 
and  with  a  brain  capable  and  highly  trained, 
will  come  to  hold  as  his  half-instinctive  faith. 
The  merits,  however,  are  there,  and  they 
are   so   characteristic   as   to   require   some 

35 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


analysis,  both  of  them  and  of  the  equally 
characteristic  defects. 

We  start  with  the  somewhat  arbitrary 
assumption  of  an  abnormal  marriage.  A 
serious  young  dalesman,  country  bred,  but 
seeking  fortune  in  the  town,  where  he  develops 
into  a  highly  skilled  artisan,  mates  with  a 
purely  Latin  type,  the  grisette  from  Provence 
adrift  in  London.  Such  a  union  would, 
naturally  enough,  produce  a  progeny  with 
ill-balanced  and  inharmonious  attributes ; 
and  though  in  the  first  child,  David  Grieve, 
the  uncongenial  strains  blend  happily,  the 
Arlesienne's  second,  and  unwelcome,  child 
is  a  freakish  unkindly  offspring.  The  two 
children,  early  deserted  by  their  mother 
and  orphaned  of  their  father,  come  back  for 
their  upbringing  to  the  dales,  where  the  care 
of  them  falls  to  their  father's  brother, 
Reuben  Grieve,  and  to  his  hard  wife,  Hannah. 
Here  we  touch  life.  The  two  children  have 
wild  blood  in  them,  but  in  the  boy  it  runs  to 
profit:  it  gives  him  the  touch  of  imagina- 
tion which  animates  his  capable  boldness. 
Yet  with  him  Mr3  Ward  has  to  describe. 

36 


NOVELSWTHE  GENERAL  WORLD 


She  writes  about  him;  she  explains  him ;  she 
does,  on  the  whole,  succeed  in  making  us 
understand.     With  the  girl  she  has  vision ; 
there  is  inspiration  in  that  portrait,  and  from 
first  to  last  Louie  Grieve  brings  her  atmos- 
phere with  her  whenever  she  enters  on  the 
scene.     She  is  a  living  force,  and  the  brain 
that  conceived  her  was  to  that  extent  an 
artist's  brain.     The  truth  about  Mrs  Ward 
seems  to  be  that  she  is  intermittently  an 
artist.     She  herself   has  taken   account   of 
the  fact,  though  she  does  not  state  it  pre- 
cisely in  these  terms.     In  the  prefaces  to 
the  Westmoreland    Edition  of   her  works, 
which  explain  the  circumstances  in  which 
each  book  came  into  being,  and  set  down  her 
later  critical  attitude  towards  it,  she  makes 
repeated  allusion  to  a  psychological  experi- 
ence, which  is  well  described  in  the  Preface 
to  Marcella : 

<<  Some  of  the  work  which,  as  I  look  back 
critically  upon  it,  seems  to  me  of  my  best— 
which  the  public  has  welcomed  most  warmly 

has  been  written  as  it  were  intellectually, 

following  out  a  logical  sequence  whether  in 

37 

174433 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


character  or  event,  under  a  conviction  of 
necessity  and  truth,  but  without  any  over- 
powering vision.  Imagination  indeed  placed 
and  dressed  the  different  scenes,  conceiving 
them  in  a  clear  succession.  But  all  through 
one  knew  how  it  was  done,  and  felt  that  with 
proper  concentration  of  mind  it  could  be 
done  again.  But  there  are  times  and  crises 
in  imaginative  work  when  this  process  seems 
to  be  quite  superseded  by  another;  and 
afterwards  in  looking  back  upon  the  results 
a  writer  will  not  know  how  it  was  done,  and 
will  not  feel  that  it  could  be  repeated.  Some- 
thing intervened — a  tranced,  absorbed  state, 
in  which  the  action  of  certain  normal  facul- 
ties seemed  suspended  in  order  that  others 
might  work  with  exceptional  ease, — like  tools 
that  elves  had  sharpened  in  the  night." 

Every  writer  of  fiction  with  the  least  real 
gift  for  his  trade  recognises  the  experience 
of  "scenes  composed"  (I  quote  now  the 
admirable  Preface  to  Sir  George  Tressady) 
"  with  the  same  imaginative  rush,  the 
strange  sense  of  a  waking  dream,  of  a  thing 
aot  invented  but  merely  reported — imposed 
as  by  a  vision  and  breathlessly  written  down." 

38 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 


This   is   the   faculty   of    invention  carried 
to   such  a  power  that  the  process  seems 
automatic,  like  that  calculating  gift  which 
enables  certain  human  beings  instantane- 
ously to  see  the  result  of  long  arithmetical 
combinations.     But  with  the  great  artists 
the    faculty    is    continuous    and    pervades 
equally    the    whole    creation.     With    Mrs 
Ward  it  is  patchy  and  discontinuous.     Her 
work  is  at  points  laborious  and  imperfect, 
at    others    surprisingly    vital.      Moreover, 
even  where  the  power  of  vision  operates,  the 
fact  that  there  is  real  invention  does  not 
suffice;    the   invention  must   interest  and 
must    impress.     She   herself   cites,   as   one 
instance  in  which  the  mood  of  possession 
lasted  continuously  with  her,  The  Story  of 
Bessie  Costrell — a  tale  rather  than  a  novel, 
the  sort  of  subject  which  Maupassant  might 
have  chosen.     Told  as  Mrs  Ward  tells  it, 
the  thing  seems  true  and  real ;   but  it  does 
not  interest,  it  does  not  hold  us.     There  is 
a  mass  of  unnecessary  detail;  Maupassant 
would  have  got  into  ten  pages  what  she 
spreads  over  a  hundred,   and,  instead  of 

39 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


wearying  us  with  the  commonness  of  the 
circumstance,  would  have  made  us  feel  that 
its  very  commonness  was  the  essence  of  the 
tragedy.  A  far  greater  talent  than  Mrs 
Ward's  is  needed  to  make  the  commonplace 
poignant:  her  invention,  when  it  is  most 
effective,  often  has  a  touch  of  the  bizarre, 
and  the  picture  of  Louie  Grieve  is  a  case  in 
point. 

Still  Mrs  Ward  can  create  Louie ;  she  can, 
at  moments,  make  David  live ;  and  by  this 
creative  gift  she  induces  readers  to  swallow 
a  deal  of  controversial  stuff  which  has  no 
artistic  value  whatever.  She  harnesses  the 
artist  in  her  to  drag  the  plough  of  a  dis- 
putant. It  is  like  providing  good  church 
music  to  drag  people  in  to  hear  a  sermon ; 
and  there  is  no  mistake  about  this,  the 
sermon  is  what  Mrs  Ward  really  cares  for. 
But  also  there  is  no  mistake  that  some  of 
the  music  is  first-rate.  We  have  the  artistic 
creation  of  Louie;  we  have  the  picture  of 
Reuben  and  Hannah.  This  is  a  picture  of 
dale  folk,  of  the  unloveliest  forms  of  Puritan- 
ism, treated  with  a  comprehension  that  has 

40 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 


in  it  nothing  cruel.  Old  Reuben,  who  so  ill 
defended  David  and  David's  sister  against 
the  tyrannous  Hannah,  is  lovable,  and 
loved,  through  all  his  weakness ;  and  even 
for  Hannah  herself,  the  shrew,  the  oppressor, 
the  defrauder  in  the  name  of  God,  Mrs  Ward 
has  at  least  respect.  Hannah  is  of  the  dales ; 
her  hardness  is  theirs,  a  thing  needed  to 
'make  up  all  that  they  stand  for. 

Another  gift  of  Mrs  Ward  shows  itself 
first  in  David  Grieve — her  remarkable  power 
of  creating  mean  feminine  types..  The  young 
lady  from  a  Manchester  book-shop  who  sets 
her  cap  at  David  is  excellently  seen.  But 
here  again  Mrs  Ward  sins  against  the  light. 
She  draws  a  nature  in  whom  vulgarity  is  of 
the  very  grain;  and  yet  we  are  asked  to 
believe  that  because  this  little  person  has 
been  taken  to  a  big  house,  where  her  husband 
is  welcome,  and  has  been  treated  by  the 
ladies  of  the  house  with  an  icy  rudeness,  and 
has  been  consoled  and  taken  home  by  her 
husband,  she  then  and  there  purges  her  soul 
of  vulgar  ambitions  and  settles  down,  to  be 
a  suitable  adoring  and  uninterfering  help- 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


mate.  The  truth  is,  and  Mrs  Ward  should 
have  admitted  it,  Lucy  was  created  to  be  a 
nuisance,  and  a  nuisance  she  would  have 
been,  even  when  she  was  dying  conveniently 
of  cancer. 

Marcdla  is  the  first  of  the  considerable 
series  of  novels  whose  interest  is  mainly 
political — in  which  the  fortunes  of  characters 
are  bound  up  with  a  House  of  Commons 
career.  Here  we  are  concerned,  not  with 
theology,  but  with  social  ethics :  and  there 
should  be  noted  also  an  increasing  pursuit 
of  vehement  dramatic  collision,  or  even  of 
violent  incident.  The  vexed  question  of 
game-preserving  is  one  which  constantly 
recurs  in  these  books — raising,  as  it  does,  in 
the  acutest  form,  problems  of  the  rights  of 
property.  But  in  Marcella  it  is  more  than 
an  abstract  question :  it  provides  the  central 
scene  of  the  book. 

Moreover,  it  is  a  characteristic  part  of 
the  new  environment  from  which  Mrs  Ward 
now  begins  to  draw  her  inspiration.  Her 
residence — from  1892  onward — has  been  in 
Hertfordshire,  amongst  the  Chiltern  hangers 

42 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 


and  beech-woods ;   she  is  surrounded  by  the 
rich  setting  of  the  home  counties;    she  is 
fascinated   with    the    old-world   beauty   of 
mansions  with  a  long  history ;    and,  as  she 
tells  us,  the  neighbourhood  in  which   she 
settled  became  almost  at  once  the  scene  of 
a  tragic  affray  between  poachers  and  keepers 
of  pheasants.     New  combinations  began  to 
take  shape  in  the  chamber  of  her  invention ; 
also,  new  subjects  demanded  to  be  ventilated. 
Her  readers  were  prepared — as  far  back  as 
! 8 94— for  Mr  Lloyd  George's  famous  budget 
and  for  the  Unionist  housing  policy.      It 
cannot  be  denied  that  Mrs  Ward  has  been 
consistently  a  serviceable  publicist.     But  in 
considering  the  artist,  to  me,  at  least,  it 
appears  that  we  have  in  these  later  books  of 
hers  one  more  illustration  of  the  truth  that 
imagination  is  thoroughly  impregnated  only 
in  the  early  years  of  life :   that  the  scenes  of 
childhood  are  stamped  there  with  a  unity 
and  completeness  of  which  later  and  more 
self-conscious    impressions    have   only    the 
simulacrum.     Reuben   and   Hannah   grow, 
so  to  speak,  out  of  the  ground ;  they  suggest 

43 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


their  setting,  they  cannot  be  separated  from 
it.  Mrs  Ward's  peasants  of  the  home 
counties  have  not  this  property:  they  are 
people  whom  she  has  seen,  whom  she  has 
visited,  whom  she  has  had  good  will  to  know ; 
but  she  has  not  grown  up  among  them  in 
that  comradeship  of  childhood  when  dis- 
tinctions of  class  are  really  obliterated. 
What,  indeed,  she  indicates  with  most  truth 
is  Marcella's  inability  to  pass  this  invisible 
barrier.  Except  in  pictures  of  the  dales, 
there  is  in  her  brain  an  eternal  separateness 
between  poor  and  rich,  educated  and  un- 
educated. The  peasants  in  her  stories  are 
little  more  than  mechanical  properties. 
Hurd  murders,  his  wife  weeps,  to  set  in 
motion  Marcella's  intellectual  and  moral 
processes.  Yet,  for  all  that,  the  faculty  of 
vision  still  is  there,  intermittent  as  always, 
not  always  to  be  counted  on,  but  potent 
when  the  spell  is  felt.  Of  all  unlikely  things, 
Mrs  Ward  gives  us  an  unforgettable  picture 
of  rabbit-netting  on  a  moonlight  night  at 
the  edge  of  one  of  the  heavy  copses  that 
fringe  those  open  bays  of  hill-side.  It  is  not 

44 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENEKAL  WORLD 


done  as  a  sportsman  would  have  done  it, 
say  Charles  Kingsley  or  some  other  in  whom 
lived  that  odd  mixture  of  the  poacher  and 
naturalist  which  breeds  the  taste  alike  for 
capture  and  for  observation  of  wild  creatures. 
But  it  is  done  with  extraordinary  vividness  ; 
the  smell,  the  feel  of  the  wood-side,  the  sounds 
and  the  stillness,  all  are  there. 
<  Also,  in  the  main  story,  account  must  be 
taken  of  Mrs  Ward's  power  to  analyse  the 
attraction  of  a  woman  for  other  women. 
Marcella's  charm,  her  power  to  command,  to 
dominate,  even  when  she  is  disliked,  among 
her  own  sex,  are  far  better  given  than  her 
effect  on  men.  It  is  in  this  last  respect, 
indeed,  that  the  story  fails.  One  may  see 
the  growth  of  Marcella's  passion  for  Aldous 
Raeburn :  we  know  nothing  at  all  about  his 
feelings  for  her.  Oddly  enough,  they  are 
better  given  in  the  sequel  to  this  novel,  Sir 
George  Tressady,  which  its  author  depreciates, 
but  which  some  probably  will  find  better 
reading  than  the  original  book.  Marcella 
is  the  central  figure  of  both;  she  is  un- 
doubtedly more  likeable  as  a  married  woman ; 

45 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


and  Mrs  Ward  has  conveyed  the  sense  of 
something  rare  and  noble  which  is  inspired 
by  a  union  between  two  strong  people  who 
are  equal  comrades.  She  conveys  also,  with 
delicacy,  if  without  amusement,  something 
of  the  inconvenience  which  is  inflicted  on  a 
politician  by  a  too  earnest  and  enthusiastic 
wife ;  indeed,  she  indicates  very  plainly  her 
characteristic  opinion  that  a  woman  ought 
to  be  interested  in  "  politics,"  ought  to  in- 
struct herself  in  their  problems,  ought  to  be 
*  capable  of  procuring  information  with  which 
to  assist  her  husband — but  had,  on  the  whole, 
better  keep  out  of  direct  political  inter- 
/  vention.  As  for  the  secondary  activities, 
exertion  of  influence  and  the  like,  the  more 
attractive  a  woman  is,  the  more  sympathetic 
her  nature,  the  likelier  she  is  to  bring  about 
some  damaging  complication — such  as  even 
Marcella  did  not  escape  from.  The  situation 
is  planned  out  with  a  real  knowledge  of  the 
world — with  a  knowledge  that  has  no 
cynical  affectation.  Marcella  is  no  doubt 
an  angel,  but  she  is  an  interfering  angel,  and 
when  she  is  drawn  to  persuade  a  political 

46 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WOULD 


opponent,  for  her  sake,  to  help  her  husband, 
there  is  a  perfectly  natural  result.  Marcella 
is  none  the  worse,  Sir  George  Tressady  is 
none  the  worse,  but  Tressady' s  wife  is  in 
serious  danger  of  being  driven  to  undertake 
reprehensible  reprisals. 

Here  again  Mrs  Ward's  gift  for  dealing 
with   mean  women  stands  to  her.     Lady 
Tressady  is  a  real  addition  to  the  portraiture 
of  contemporary  types;    for  the  shrewish 
little  doll  is  seen  with  humanity,  and  we  are 
made  to  understand,  if  not  sympathise  with, 
the  phases  of  her  jealous  rage.     One  scene 
in  this  book— that  where  Marcella  comes  to 
apologise  to  and  appease  the  woman  whose 
husband  she  has  unwittingly  made  captive 
—is  perhaps  the  best  thing  Mrs  Ward  has 
done :   as  a  piece  of  technical  mastery  in  the 
contrasting  of  two  women's  characters  it 
was  more  difficult  to  achieve  than  the  central 
chapters   of  Robert   Elsmere.     And   if  the 
novelist  implies  that  Marcella  strained  com- 
passion almost  to  the  limit  of  folly,  it  is  only 
by  way  of  reminding  us  that  Lady  Maxwell's 
married    felicity    (too    sacred    for    Letty 

47 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


Tressady's  ears)  was  of  a  piece  with  her 
fortune  and  her  station  in  the  world.  Even 
here  one  cavils  only  at  the  novelist' s  implied 
comment:  the  dramatic  movement  of  the 
scene,  the  truth  of  what  the  two  women  do 
and  say,  could  hardly  be  bettered. 

Not  less  good  than  the  picture  of  Sir 
George  Tressady's  wife  is  that  of  his  mother. 
The  feather-witted  ex-beauty,  ravaging  her 
son's  resources  as  she  had  ravaged  his 
father's,  is  a  genuine  type.  Mrs  Ward  has 
the  power  to  present  her.  What  she  lacks  is 
the  power  to  do  so  with  that  clean,  decisive 
touch  which  stamps  the  artist.  Everywhere, 
in  any  given  paragraph,  in  any  given  scene, 
one  is  conscious  of  redundancies.  The 
medium  in  which  she  works  has  no  charm — 
she  plasters  her  effects.  But  she  has  the 
gift  of  characterisation  and  the  gift  for  con- 
structing a  story  which  upon  the  whole 
sustains  interest  and  stands  critical  examina- 
tion with  a  reasonable  measure  of  success. 

Her  interest  in  following  out  the  various 
types  of  intellectual  revolt  is  not  matched 
by  any  pursuit  of  the  bewildering  problems 

48 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 

which  sex  presents.  Certain  conclusions 
are  stated  by  her,  and  she  is  all  on  the  side 
of  orthodoxy.  David  Grieve  becomes  the 
lover  of  a  Parisian  art  student.  If  he  does 
not  marry  her,  that  is  because  she  accepts 
only  the  union  libre.  She  leaves  him  lest 
her  art  should  suffer,  and  he  has  nothing  to 
disturb  his  soul  except  a  connection  not 
legally  sanctioned — for  at  the  time  he  is  in- 
tellectually severed  from  all  Christian  belief. 
Yet  Mrs  Ward  makes  him  aware  of  a  hurt 
done  to  his  deepest  nature:  he  has  a  con- 
sciousness of  sin.  On  the  other  hand,  in  one 
of  her  later  books,  Manisty,  a  dabbler  in 
religion,  is  reported  to  have  lived  through  a 
couple  of  passions  in  his  past,  but  there  is 
no  suggestion  that  they  have  marked  him 
or  affected  the  quality  of  his  relations  to 
other  women.  David  afterwards  makes  a 
marriage  which  is  avowedly  accepted  as  an 
example  of  the  second  best — and  a  very  poor 
second  best ;  but  Mrs  Ward,  as  I  have 
indicated,  does  not  face  the  facts  here.  In 
Marcella  and  in  Tressady  she  walks  on  tiptoe 
up  to  a  difficulty  and  then  retires.  Suppose 
d  49 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


Marcella,  instead  of  finding  herself  preserved 
for  the  virtuous  Tory,  had  married  the 
picturesque,  deceiving  Radical  —  suppose 
Wharton  had  not,  at  the  lucky  moment,  been 
found  out !  No  doubt  a  novelist  is  not 
bound  to  tackle  the  problems  which  she 
adumbrates.  But  in  Sir  George  Tressady 
the  pieces  are  set.  Tressady  has  married 
"  with  less  thought  than  he  would  have 
given  to  the  mating  of  an  animal " — and 
'  trouble  has  followed.  It  is  too  easy  a  way 
out  to  kill  him,  melodramatically,  in  the 
last  chapter.  Mrs  Ward  does  not  want  to 
discuss  what  would  have  happened  had  he 
lived.  There  are  plenty  of  novelists  to  take 
up  this  department  of  discussion,  and  we 
have  no  cause  to  complain.  But  in  a  writer 
who  is  so  explicitly  the  holder  of  a  didactic 
philosophy  it  is  necessary  to  mark  the 
limitation. 

The  subjects  which  she  treats  with  com- 
petent assurance  are  those  proper  to  the 
platform  and  the  lecture-room — in  the  case 
of  these  two  books,  political  speculations. 
Here  we  have  a  fancy  picture  of  a  Unionist 

50 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 


Government    introducing    legislation    of    a 
socialist  and  collectivist  character:    risking 
its  political  life  for  the  attempt  to  regulate 
drastically  the  conditions  of  labour.     Con- 
sidering the  book  as  a  prophecy,  the  foreseen 
case  has  delayed  to  accomplish  itself :    but 
as  a  study  of  the  rival  points  of  view  Mrs 
Ward's  pages  may  well  furnish  good  matter 
ior  readers  not  concerned  with  these  things 
at  first  hand.     She   sees  very  clearly  the 
perpetual    struggle    between    irreconcilable 
points  of  view — that  which  seeks  to  maintain 
individual  freedom  as  the  chief  good,  and 
that  which   seeks  to   regulate  citizens  by 
authority  of  superior  and  established  know- 
ledge ;   and  she  perceives  shrewdly  that  the 
collectivist  and  authoritarian  view  has  much 
to  commend  itself  to  the  instincts  of  a  trained 
governing    class:     in   a    word,    that    Tory 
Socialism  is  a  very  defensible  combination. 
Yet  here  her  speculative  mind  is  operating 
in  a  vacuum.     In  Marcella   her   theme  is 
better  nourished  with  fact  when  she  portrays 
the    struggle    between    the    theory    which 
justifies  landlords'  power  by  pointing  to  their 

51 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


prudent  and  philanthropic  use  of  it,  and,  on 
the  other  hand,  those  schemes  which  aim  at 
giving  to  the  rural  worker  a  wider  scope  and 
a  much  enlarged  right. 

Very  wisely,  Mrs  Ward  does  not  attempt  to 
reach  a  solution;  she  sets  out  with  tact  the 
case  for  an  enlightened  Toryism;  but  she 
makes  plain  also  the  uncertainty  and  dis- 
quiet which  harass  many  honourable  minds 
with  the  question:  Why  should  we  have 
so  much  when  those  about  us  have  so 
little  ? 

Equally  characteristic  of  her  is  to  show 
lovingly  how  much  they  have.  She  delights 
in  a  well-ordered  sumptuousness,  and  prob- 
ably not  a  few  of  her  readers  take  a  special 
pleasure  in  what  she  writes  with  gusto — de- 
scriptions of  stately  abodes,  the  harmony  of 
carpets  and  hangings,  the  evolutions  of  well- 
trained  domestics,  the  presence  of  historic 
canvases  on  the  wall,  the  accumulation  of 
choice  treasures  in  a  hereditary  home,  itself 
a  jewel,  where  generation  after  generation 
grows  up,  subconsciously  cultured  and  per- 
fected by  the  mellowing  influence  of  all  this 

52 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 

distinguished  environment.  For  an  age 
exceedingly  possessed  by  the  taste  for 
domestic  decoration,  a  period  in  which  con- 
noisseurship  has  become  a  ruling  affecta- 
tion, such  passages  must  have  the  attraction 
that  Kingsley's  excursions  into  trout-fishing 
or  Lever's  account  of  a  fox-hunt  have  for  a 
mass  of  readers.  Here  is  a  characteristic 
^example : 

"  He  was  ushered  first  into  a  stately  outer 
drawing-room,  filled  with  old  French  furni- 
ture and  fine  pictures;  then  the  butler 
lifted  a  velvet  curtain,  pronounced  the 
visitor's  name  with  a  voice  and  emphasis 
as  perfectly  trained  as  the  rest  of  him,  and 
stood  aside  for  George  to  enter. 

"  He  found  himself  on  the  threshold  of  a 
charming  room  looking  west,  and  lit  by  some 
last  beams  of  February  sun.  The  pale- 
green  walls  were  covered  with  a  medley  of 
prints  and  sketches.  A  large  writing-table, 
untidily  heaped  with  papers,  stood  con- 
spicuous on  the  blue  self-coloured  carpet, 
which  over  a  great  part  of  the  floor  was 
pleasantly  void  and  bare.  Flat  earthenware 
pans,  planted  with  hyacinths  and  narcissus, 

53 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


stood  here  and  there,  and  filled  the  air  with 
spring  scents.  Books  ran  round  the  lower 
walls,  or  lay  piled  wherever  there  was  a 
space  for  them ;  while  about  the  fire  at  the 
further  end  was  gathered  a  circle  of  chintz- 
covered  chairs — chairs  of  all  shapes  and 
sizes,  meant  for  talking.  The  whole  im- 
pression of  the  pretty,  disorderly  place, 
compared  with  the  stately  drawing-room 
behind  it,  was  one  of  intimity  and  freedom ; 
the  room  made  a  friend  of  you  as  you 
entered." 

Such  passages,  apart  from  their  artistic 
value,  have  an  extrinsic  interest — the  in- 
terest, so  to  say,  of  a  guide-book  to  the 
domestic  circles  of  the  really  great.  Mrs 
Ward  undoubtedly  knows  how  people  with 
fifty  thousand  a  year  and  a  great  political 
position  do,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  dress  and 
house  themselves :  even  the  uninitiated  feel 
that  she  can  be  trusted  to  give  a  faithful 
account  of  what  passes  in  these  exalted 
spheres ;  and  she  is  quite  determined  in  her 
purpose  of  reproducing  their  splendour.  The 
"  best  people  " — in  her  sense  those  who  are 

54 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 


privileged  to  enjoy  this  way  of  life — value 
little  less  than  their  illustrious  possessions 
(so  she  would  seem  to  say)   the  presence 
among  them  of  new  and  real  merit.    Personal 
distinction  will  admit  a  man,  and  possibly 
his  dependents,  to  these  charmed  regions, 
and  if  he  is  of  the  elect  he  will  find  himself 
entirely  at  home  there.     He  will  recognise 
that  the  stewards  of  those  excellences  admit 
his  right  to  participate ;  and  in  that  way  the 
hereditary,  trained,  governing  class  will  have 
gained  by  the  reception  of  new  blood.     That, 
at  least,  is  how  I  interpret  her  philosophy. 
The  splendours  are  a  trust:  they  are  also, 
in  practice,  something  of  a  touchstone  or 
criterion :   if  a  man  looks  all  right  when  put 
alongside  of  them,  the  test  is  satisfactory. 
David  Grieve,  for  instance,  is  accepted,  and 
his  wife  no  less  clearly  cast  out. 

It  is,  in  short,  part  of  Mrs  Ward's  phil- 
osophy to  set  high  value  on  a  gathered, 
accumulated  and  transmitted  culture,  on 
what  may  be  called  the  culture-producing 
plant,  and  she  does  not  see  clearly  how  this 
is  to  be  obtained  without  the  existence  of 

55 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


privileged  persons  who  shall  be  its  hereditary 
custodians. 

One  detects  plainly  enough  the  influence 
of  Oxford.  Tli ere  beauty,  the  costly  work 
of  artists,  enriched  by  a  myriad  associations, 
is  made  communally  accessible,  yet  com- 
mitted to  the  charge  of  a  selected  order,  for 
whom  there  is  provided  a  decent  and  even  a 
dignified  way  of  living.  Whether  she  knows 
it  or  not,  Mrs  Ward's  conception  of  the  inner 
governing  world  of  Great  Britain  is  that  of 
another  Oxford — another  aristocracy  placed 
in  surroundings  which,  of  themselves,  must 
impress  and  mould  the  mind.  She  is  so 
much  in  love  with  ripe  perfection  that  she 
cannot  contemplate  happily  any  group  of 
people  not  so  provided — with  the  single 
exception  of  her  dales'  folk.  With  them  she 
knows  the  life,  she  accepts  its  compensa- 
tions ;  she  sees  it  set  in  beauty,  even  at  its 
bleakest.  Apart  from  this,  she  is  the  novel- 
ist of  the  cultivated  rich.  An  heirloom  will 
attract  her,  even  if  it  is  a  neglected  heirloom ; 
but  the  society  of  decent  villa  residences 
is  outside  her  ken.     There  are,  it  is  true, 

56 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 

certain  persons  in  her  books,  like  the  Edward 
Hallin  of  Marcella,  who  live  penuriously, 
bnt  they  may  be  considered,  for  all  practical 
purposes,  as  hermits,  and  they  are  hermits 
with  a  free  foot  in  the  superior  dwell- 
ings, whether  it  be  Oxford  or  in  the  larger 
world. 

It  is  true,  and  should  be  remembered,  that 
Meredith  was  equally  attracted  by  splendour, 
and  could  never  have  reconciled  his  spirit 
to  the  environments  which  W.  D.  Howells 
and  Arnold  Bennett  (to  pick  two  writers  at 
a  venture)  tend  to  prefer.  There  are  artists 
for  whom  the  scene  must  be  richly  set.  It 
is  characteristic  of  Mrs  Ward  and  of  the  time 
in  which  she  writes  that  she  should  attach 
so  much  ethical  importance  to  the  setting 
— and  that  in  very  characteristic  cases  she 
should  half  apologise  for  the  existence  of 
what  she  emphasises.  Marcella  and  her 
husband  would  not  feel  quite  happy  about 
their  houses  in  Brookshire  and  St  James's 
Square  if  they  did  not  also  keep  up  an  estab- 
lishment in  the  Mile  End  Road,  where  they 
spend  several  days  a  week  quite  happily  with 

57 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


only  five  servants  to  look  after  them.  The 
specified  detail  of  their  household  is  so  typical 
as  to  be  worth  extracting.  There  are  "  two 
little  workhouse  girls"  (Mrs  Ward  knows 
that  no  trained  servant  would  consent  to  be 
employed  by  a  rich  peer  in  such  surround- 
ings); a  German  charwoman  to  cook,  whose 
nationality  answers  for  it  that  there  shall 
be  no  undue  research  about  the  dinners ;  a 
village  boy  from  Marcella's  house  in  Brook- 
shire  to  give  a  friendly,  patriarchal  touch ; 
and,  finally, "  the  ancient  maid  who  had  been 
Marcella's  mother's  maid,"  for  personal 
service.  When  one  knows  all  this,  one  really 
has  a  clear  picture  of  the  establishment ; 
but  it  is  completed  by  the  description  of 
Marcella,  on  days  when  her  husband  had  to 
be  away,  going  out "  to  meet  him  at  the  train 
in  the  evening  like  any  small  clerk's  wife,  to 
help  him  carry  the  books  and  papers  with 
which  he  was  generally  laden,  along  the  hot 
and  dingy  street,  to  make  him  tea  from  her 
little  spirit-kettle,  and  then  to  hear  the  news 
of  the  day  in  the  shade  of  the  little  sooty 
back  garden,  while  the  German  charwoman 

58 


NOVELS  OF  THE  GENERAL  WORLD 


had  her  way  with  the  dinner."  Under 
these  conditions  one  is  quite  content  to  learn 
that  slumming  "  amused  and  delighted " 
the  great  lady.  Only,  if  Tolstoi  had  been 
making  a  similar  study,  would  he  have  left 
his  great-hearted  woman  content  to  reconcile 
herself  to  the  existence  of  slumdom  by 
paying  such  ransom  as  this  for  the  great  house 
.in  Brookshire?  But  Mrs  Ward  is  too 
thoroughly  Anglican  not  to  be  imbued  with 
the  spirit  of  compromise :  and  that  spirit, 
however  excellent  in  a  citizen,  makes  un- 
sympathetic literature.  Even  in  the  sphere 
of  feeling  which  is  most  vital  with  her,  the 
realm  of  religious  emotion,  she  retains 
something  of  this  quality.  Here,  and  here 
only,  her  characters  risk  all  to  gain  all ;  yet 
the  great  sacrifices  which  she  sets  out  for 
admiration  are  in  a  sense  made  to  uphold 
the  right  of  compromise.  Elsmere  ruins  his 
position  by  the  claim  to  accept  so  much  as 
suits  him  of  a  prescribed  system.  Once, 
and  only  once,  Mrs  Ward  has  written  a  novel 
whose  theme  was  the  clash  of  religious  ideals, 
and  has  written  it  without  a  propagandist 

59 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


purpose.  The  theme  of  that  novel  was 
the  impossibility  of  compromise  between 
irreconcilable  faiths — and  in  handling  it 
Mrs  Ward  reached  her  highest  achieve- 
ment. 


60 


IV 

HELBECK  OF  BANNISDALE 
AND  ELEANOR 

Y  JELBECK  OF  BANNISDALE  was 

</  /  published  in  1898,  two  years  after 
*■  -^  its  predecessor,  and  ten  after 
Robert  Elsmere,  to  which  it  was  the  comple- 
mentary subject.  The  believing  man  finds 
himself  at  once  drawn  to  and  sundered  from 
the  unbelieving  woman.  Yet  the  collision 
is  reduced  to  simpler  terms.  Helbeck,  the 
Koman  Catholic,  with  ages  of  tradition 
behind  him,  loves  the  girl  who  simply  cannot 
believe — can  find  no  way  to  parley  with  that 
form  of  creed  which  is  most  averse  to 
compromise,  which  knows  no  mean  between 
acceptance  and  rejection ;  and  the  inevitable 
end  arrives. 

Already,  indeed,  in  Sir  George  Tressady, 
Mrs  Ward  had  shown  an  increased  ability  to 
weld  her  propaganda  with  her  story — to  fuse 

61 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


the  background  of  political  speculation  with 
the  movement  of  her  characters ;  and  here 
she  betters  that  example  by  her  tact  in  the 
choice  of  grouping.  Her  own  account  of 
the  matter  deserves  to  be  quoted  at  length. 
In  it  she  tells  how  the  story  of  an  ancient 
Catholic  house  in  Northern  England  had 
touched  her  imagination  with  its  tale  of 
privations  and  of  slowly  advancing  beggary 
endured  for  the  sake  of  faith.  Yet  in  touch- 
ing her  heart  the  story  had  challenged  the 
modern  in  her  mind: 

"  Such  constancy  as  had  been  shown  in 
this  long  series  of  unknown  or  persecuted 
lives  thrilled  the  heart.  But  what  of  those 
forces  against  which  this  Catholic  family 
had  so  stoutly  held  its  own  ? — the  main 
forces  of  our  English  civilisation  ?  What 
had  they  to  say  for  themselves — the  life  and 
thought  of  Protestantism  and  the  free  mind  ? 
— as  against  this  silent,  age-long  defiance  to 
which  failure  and  misfortune  had  given  a 
spell  and  a  power  so  pathetic  ? 

'  Clearly  there  was  romance,  poetry,  in 
this  mere  juxtaposition.  Suppose  the  con- 
tending forces  represented,  at  the  present 

62 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 


time,  by  two  human  beings — a  man  and  a 
woman  ?     There   was   the  germ  of   '  truth 
embodied  in  a  tale '  !     But  how  ?     To  make 
the  woman  the  priestess  of  the  past,  while 
the  man  stood  for  modernity  and  the  victori- 
ous  to-day,   would   be   easy — and  conven- 
tional.    But  if  the  woman  were  the  modern 
representative     of     the     critical,    scientific 
mind?     Evidently   she    could    not   be    so, 
'  argumentatively,  intellectually.     Under  the 
primeval,  universal  laws  of  romance,  in  such 
a  reading  of  the  situation  there  would  be 
neither  story  nor  charm.     For  what  is  it 
indeed  that  conquers  in  life  ?    What  was  it 
that  so  gripped  the  mind  in  the  story  of  this 
Catholic  family  ?     Surely  not  their  strength, 
but  their  weakness.     If  their  Catholicism 
had  been  a  triumphant,  well-armed,  argu- 
mentative Catholicism,  like  that  which  ex- 
communicates an  Abbe  Loisy,  to  us  at  least 
who  were  discussing  their  history  it  would 
have    made   no   appeal  whatever.     It   was 
their  passivity,  so  to  speak— their  lying  at 
the  mercy  both  of  the  militant,  intriguing 
Catholicism  which  used  and  exploited  them, 
and  of  the   militant   Protestantism   which 
made  them  suffer — it  was  this  which  touched 
us. 

63 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


"  Suppose,  therefore,  in  such  a  story  as 
had  begun  already  to  shape  itself  from  the 
mists,  this  triumphant  weakness,  this '  dying 
to  live,'  were  given  to  the  woman,  who  yet, 
as  standing  for  modern  civilisation,  and  the 
ideas  on  which  it  is  built,  would  have  in 
truth  the  strong  and  conquering  role  ? 
Suppose  to  her  were  assigned  the  same  in- 
stinctive loyalty  to  something  greater  than 
herself,  which  she  cannot  expound  or  analyse, 
but  which  she  feels,  for  which  she  can  die, — 
as  that  which  made  the  tragedy  and  the 
greatness  of  the  Catholic  story  ?  Let  her 
bear  in  her  frail  hands  the  torch  of  freedom 
— and  let  her  sink  and  perish  under  the 
weight  of  it !  Let  her  represent  the  same 
dumb  clinging,  a  clinging  of  the  heart — to 
an  idea ;  place  on  her  lips  that  same  pitiful 
cry  of  tortured  but  inexorable  loyalty  that 
has  given  a  terrible  beauty  to  so  many 
Catholic  martyrdoms ;  but  let  it  be  in  the 
interest  of  that  order  of  thought  which  is 
opposed  to  Catholicism  in  a  lrfe-and-death 
struggle.  And  let  this  dumb  clinging  rob 
her  of  life  and  joy,  just  as  the  older  fidelity 
robbed  its  votaries  of  life  and  joy  through 
generations. 

"  Here,  it  seemed  to  me,  was  a  fine  subject. 

64 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 


It  began  at  once  with  heat  and  violence  to 
clothe  itself  in  detail. 

"  The  day  after  the  conversation  I  have 
described  I  left  the  North  for  London. 
Through  the  long  day  in  the  train  the  story 
grew,  threw  out  episodes  and  ramifications, 
became  hour  by  hour  an  organic  whole.  By 
the  time  I  arrived  at  Euston,  I  knew  Helbeck 
and  Laura.  His  dark  head,  and  darkly 
^handsome  features,  and  behind  them,  iron 
will,  and  the  ascetic  temper,  the  lightly 
moving,  elfish  Laura,  with  the  silent  defiance 
in  her  grey  eyes ;  the  passion  which  brought 
them  together,  and  in  the  end  destroyed 
them :  these  were  plain  to  me — the  creatures, 
or  elements,  of  a  new  and  enthralling  fuppen 
theater  of  the  mind." 

So  came  into  existence  a  novel  which  it  is 
a  pleasure  to  praise  without  reserve.  Mrs 
Ward  here  lays  open  her  method :  she  plans 
the  thing  in  terms  of  spiritual  anatomy, 
and  then  proceeds  to  clothe  them  with  flesh ; 
the  book,  for  that  reason,  has  some  rigidity 
of  pattern— but  the  characters  come  to  life. 
Life  there  is  not  only  in  Helbeck  and  in 
Laura— the  girl  bred  in  a  university  town— 
b  65 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


but  in  Laura's  dale-folk  cousins;  above  all, 
in  the  fanatical  Calvinist  woman  that  rules 
at  Browhead  Farm.  What  is  more,  the  in- 
vention of  the  whole  is  good.  Mrs  Ward's 
passion  for  houses  and  furniture  here  lends 
her  an  inspiration  in  the  conception  of 
Helbeck  dominated  by  family  pride,  yet 
selling  away  for  charity  his  ancestral  chairs 
and  hangings,  till  there  is  left  only  his  great 
Romney — which  Laura  begs  him  to  spare, 
and  which  is  finally  sacrificed  because  he 
will  not  sell  land  for  heretics  to  build  a 
church  on. 

There  is  a  saying  in  this  book,  put  char- 
acteristically into  the  mouth  of  a  Cambridge 
professor,  that  the  English  universities  need 
a  Chair  of  "  the  Inner  Life."  What  dis- 
tinguishes Mrs  Ward  from  many  contem- 
porary novelists  is  her  close  familiarity  with 
the  material,  the  literature,  that  such  a 
Chair  must  handle.  When  she  writes,  in 
David  Grieve,  that  after  David's  spiritual 
crisis — inspired  by  a  conviction  of  sin — "  the 
whole  atmosphere  and  temperature  of  the 
soul "  was  changed,  she  writes  a  significant 

66 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 


language.  Not  for  nothing  has  she  studied 
"  all  those  treasures  of  spiritual  experience 
which  Catholicism  has  secreted  for  centuries." 
And  she  is  qualified  to  interpret,  even  when 
she  interprets  only  to  deny.  Strangely 
enough,  she  has  never  drawn  a  man  so  well 
as  in  Helbeck — this  figure  of  a  natural  priest 
held  away  from  his  vocation,  racked  and  torn 
t  through  his  very  virtues. 

Here,  too,  is  what  I  find  nowhere  else  in 
this  writer — a  true  suggestion  of  passion 
both  in  man  and  woman — passion,  with  its 
suddenness  and  abandonment,  all  the  more 
violent  because  it  comes  almost  as  a  purely 
spiritual  force  to  natures  essentially  virginal : 
the  passion  in  which  touch  is  already  posses- 
sion. In  truth,  what  Mrs  Ward  has  painted 
is  the  passion  of  an  ascetic :  she  does  not 
succeed  with  the  grosser  clay  of  ordinary  men. 

Beyond  these  excellences,  there  is  in  this 
book  once  more,  and  better  seen  than  else- 
where, the  spirit  of  that  northern  landscape ; 
it  and  its  beauty  and  its  bleakness  pervade 
every  scene ;  and  Laura,  who  comes  back  to 
it  as  to  her  cradle,  belongs  to  the  picture, 

67 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


like  one  of  its  own  daffodils.  The  fineness 
of  the  flower-harbouring  grass  is  hers,  and 
also  the  sunlit  coldness  of  its  rocks  and 
streams.  Helbeck,  too,  belongs  to  it.  Mrs 
Ward  has  known  well  where  to  place  that 
Puritanism  of  the  Romanist :  it  belongs  to 
her  dales.  Not  in  any  other  setting  can  I 
conceive  of  her  writing  in  sympathy  with  an 
upholder  of  the  fiercest  resistance  to  modern 
ideas ;  but  Helbeck  and  his  Bannisdale  are 
one:  she  knows  them  as  ancestral  neigh- 
bours might. 

Her  work  cannot  be  better  illustrated  than 
by  a  passage,  necessarily  prolonged,  which 
gives  at  once  her  interpretation  of  the 
northern  background,  of  the  girl's  mood 
towards  her  strange  lover,  and  of  the  in- 
stinctive revolt  in  Laura's  mind  which 
defines  at  once  the  nature  of  what  in  her 
insists  on  freedom  and  the  quality  of  the 
invading  power: 

"  One  afternoon  towards  the  end  of  Mr 
Williams's  visit,  Laura  was  walking  along  a 
high  field-path  that  overlooked  the  whole 

68 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 


valley  of  the  Flent.  Helbeck  had  gone  to 
meet  the  Bishop  on  some  urgent  business ; 
but  the  name  of  his  Catholic  affairs  was 

legion. 

"  The  weather,  after  long  days  of  golden 
mist,  of  veiled  and  stealing  lights  on  stream 
and  fell,  had  turned  to  rain  and  tumult. 
This  afternoon,  indeed,  the  rain  had  made 
a  sullen  pause.     It  had  drawn  back  for  an 
hour  or  two  from  the  drenched  valleys,  even 
from  the  high  peaks  that  stood  violet-black 
against  a  space  of  rainy  light.     Yet  still  the 
sky  was  full  of  anger.     The  clouds,  dark  and 
jagged,  rushed  across  the  marsh-lands  before 
the  north-west  wind.     And  the  colour  of 
everything — of   the   moss,    the   peaks,   the 
nearer  crags  and  fields — was  superbly  rich 
and  violent.     The  soaked  woods  of  the  park 
from  which  she  had  just  emerged  were  almost 
black,  and  from  their  heart  Laura  could  hear 
the  river's  swollen  voice  pursuing  her  as  she 

walked. 

"  There  was  something  in  the  afternoon 
that  reminded  her  of  her  earliest  impressions 
of  Bannisdale  and  its  fell  country— of  those 
rainy  March  winds  that  were  blowing  about 
her  when  she  first  alighted  at  the  foot  of  the 
old  tower. 

69 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


The  association  made  her  tremble  and 
catch  her  breath.  It  was  not  all  joy — oh ! 
far  from  it !  The  sweet  common  rapture  of 
common  love  was  not  hers.  Instinctively 
she  felt  something  in  her  own  lot  akin  to 
the  wilder  and  more  tragic  aspects  of  this 
mountain  land,  to  which  she  had  turned 
from  the  beginning  with  a  daughter's 
yearning. 
•  ••»... 

"  Had  the  differences  between  her  and 
Helbeck  been  differences  of  opinion,  they 
would  have  melted  like  morning  dew.  But 
they  went  far  deeper.  Helbeck,  indeed, 
was  in  his  full  maturity.  He  had  been 
trained  by  Jesuit  teachers ;  he  had  lived 
and  thought;  his  mind  had  a  framework. 
Had  he  ever  felt  a  difficulty,  he  would  have 
been  ready,  no  doubt,  with  the  answer  of  the 
schools.  But  he  was  governed  by  heart  and 
imagination  no  less  than  Laura.  A  service- 
able intelligence  had  been  used  simply  to 
strengthen  the  claims  of  feeling  and  faith. 
Such  as  it  was,  however,  it  knew  itself. 
It  was  at  command. 

'  But  Laura ! — Laura  was  the  pure  pro- 
duct of  an  environment.  She  represented 
forces  of  intelligence,  of  analysis,  of  criticism, 

70 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 


of  which  in  themselves  she  knew  little  or 
nothing,  except  so  far  as  they  affected  all  her 
modes  of  feeling.  She  felt  as  she  had  been 
born  to  feel,  as  she  had  been  trained  to  feel. 
But  when  in  this  new  conflict — a  conflict  of 
instincts,  of  the  deepest  tendencies  of  two 
natures — she  tried  to  lay  hold  upon  the 
rational  life,  to  help  herself  by  it,  and  from 
it,  it  failed  her  everywhere.  She  had  no 
"tools,  no  weapons.  The  Catholic  argument 
scandalised,  exasperated  her ;  but  she  could 
not  meet  it.  And  the  personal  prestige  and 
fascination  of  her  lover  did  but  increase 
with  her,  as  her  feeling  grew  more  troubled 
and  excited,  and  her  intellectual  defence 
weaker. 

"  Meanwhile  to  the  force  of  temperament 
there  was  daily  added  the  force  of  a  number 
of  childish  prejudices  and  dislikes.  She  had 
come  to  Bannisdale  prepared  to  hate  all 
she  saw  there ;  and  with  the  one  supreme 
exception,  hatred  had  grown  at  command. 
She  was  a  creature  of  excess;  of  poignant 
and  indelible  impressions.  The  nuns,  with 
their  unintelligible  virtues,  and  their  very 
obvious  bigotries  and  littlenesses ;  the  sly- 
ness and  absurdities  of  Father  Bowles ;  the 
priestly  claims  of  Father  Leadham;    the 

71 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 

various  superstitions  and  peculiarities  of 
the  many  priests  and  religious  who  had 
passed  through  the  house  since  she  knew  it — 
alas !  she  hated  them  all ! — and  did  not 
know  how  she  was  to  help  hating  them  in  the 
future.  These  Catholic  figures  were  to  her 
so  many  disagreeable  automata,  moved  by 
springs  she  could  not  possibly  conceive,  and 
doing  perpetually  the  most  futile  and  foolish 
things.  She  knew,  moreover,  by  a  sure  in- 
stinct, that  she  had  been  unwelcome  to  them 
from  the  first  moment  of  her  appearance, 
and  that  she  was  now  a  stumbling-block  and 
a  grievance  to  them  all. 

"  Was  she  by  submission  to  give  these 
people,  so  to  speak,  a  right  to  meddle  and 
dabble  in  her  heart  ?  Was  she  to  be  wept 
over  by  Sister  Angela — to  confess  her  sins 
to  Father  Bowles — still  worse,  to  Father 
Leadham  ?  As  she  asked  herself  the  ques- 
tion, she  shrank  in  sudden  passion  from  the 
whole  world  of  ideas  concerned — from  all 
those  stifling  notions  of  sin,  penance,  absolu- 
tiou,  direction,  as  they  were  conventionalised 
in  Catholic  practice,  and  chattered  about  by 
stupid  aud  mindless  people.  In  defiance  of 
them,  her  whole  nature  stood  like  a  charged 
weapon,  ready  to  strike. 

72 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 

"  For  she  had  been  bred  in  that  strong  sense 
of  personal  dignity  which  in  all  ages  has  been 
the  alternative  to  the  abasements  and 
humiliations  of  religion.  And  with  that 
sense  of  dignity  went  reserve — the  intimate 
conviction  that  no  feeling  which  is  talked 
about,  which  can  be  observed  and  handled 
and  measured  by  other  people,  is  worth  a 
.rush.  It  was  what  seemed  to  her  the 
spiritual  intrusiveness  of  Catholicism,  its 
perpetual  uncovering  of  the  soul — its  dis- 
respect for  the  secrets  of  personality — its 
humiliation  of  the  will — that  made  it  most 
odious  in  the  eyes  of  this  daughter  of  a 
modern  world,  which  finds  in  the  develop- 
ment and  ennobling  of  our  human  life  its 
most  characteristic  faith. 

"  There  were  many  moments  indeed  in 
which  the  whole  Catholic  system  appeared 
to  Laura's  strained  imagination  as  one  vast 
chasse — an  assemblage  of  hunters  and  their 
toils — against  which  the  poor  human  spirit 
that  was  their  quarry  must  somehow  protect 
itself,  with  every  possible  wile  or  violence. 

"  So  that  neither  submission,  nor  a  mere 
light  tolerance  and  forgetting,  were  possible. 
Other  girls,  it  seemed,  married  Catholics  and 
made  nothing  of  it — agreed  pleasantly  to 

73 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


differ  all  their  lives.  Her  heart  cried  out  f 
There  could  be  no  likeness  between  these 
Catholic  husbands  and  Alan  Helbeck. 

"  In  the  first  days  of  their  engagement  she 
had  often  said  to  herself:  '  I  need  have 
nothing  to  do  with  it ! '  or  '  Some  things  are 
so  lovely ! — I  will  only  think  of  them.'  In 
those  hours  beside  the  sea  it  had  been  so 
easy  to  be  tolerant  and  kind.  Helbeck  was 
hers  from  morning  till  night.  And  she,  so 
much  younger,  so  weak  and  small  and 
ignorant,  had  seemed  to  hold  his  life,  with 
all  its  unexplored  depths  and  strengths,  in 
her  hand. 

"  And  now  ! 

"  She  threw  herself  down  on  a  rock  that 
jutted  from  the  wet  grass,  and  gave  herself 
up  to  the  jealous  pain  that  possessed  her. 

"  A  few  more  days  and  Mr  Williams  would 
be  gone.  There  was  some  relief  in  that 
thought.  That  strange  scene  in  the  drawing- 
room — deep  as  all  concerned  had  buried  it 
in  oblivious  silence — had  naturally  made  his 
whole  visit  an  offence  to  her.  In  her 
passionate  way  she  felt  herself  degraded  by 
his  very  presence  in  the  house.  His  eyes 
constantly  dropt,  especially  in  her  presence 

74 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 


and  Augustina's,  his  evident  cold  shrinking 
from  the  company  of  women — she  thought 
of  them  with  disgust  and  anger.  For  she 
said  to  herself  that  now  she  understood  what 
they  meant. 

"  Of  late  she  had  been  constantly  busy 
with  the  books  that  stood  to  the  right  of 
Helbeck's  table.  She  could  not  keep  herself 
away  from  them,  although  the  signs  of 
tender  and  familiar  use  they  bore  were  as 
thorns  in  her  sore  sense.  Even  his  books 
were  better  friends  to  him  than  she !  And 
especially  had  she  been  dipping  into  those 
Lives  of  the  Saints  that  Helbeck  read  habitu- 
ally day  by  day ;  of  which  he  talked  to  young 
Williams  with  a  minuteness  of  knowledge 
that  he  scarcely  possessed  on  any  other 
subject — knowledge  that  appeared  in  all  the 
details  of  the  chapel  painting.  And  on  one 
occasion,  as  she  turned  over  the  small,  worn 
volumes  of  his  Alban  Butler,  she  had  come 
upon  a  certain  passage  in  the  life  of  St 
Charles  Borromeo : 

" '  Out  of  a  most  scrupulous  love  of  purity 
.  .  .  neither  would  he  speak  to  any  woman, 
not  even  to  his  pious  aunt,  or  sisters,  or  any 
nun,  but  in  sight  of  at  least  two  persons,  and 
in  as  few  words  as  possible.' 

75 


MES  HUMPHRY  WARD 


"  The  girl  flung  it  down.  Surrounded  as 
she  often  was  by  priests — affronted  by  those 
downcast  eyes  of  the  scholastic — the  passage 
came  upon  her  as  an  insult." 

If  one  places  Helbeck  at  the  head  of  Mrs 
Ward's  achievements,  it  must  be  allowed 
that  Eleanor,  which  followed  it  (again,  at  an 
interval  of  two  years),  is  equal  to  it  in 
technical  accomplishment,  in  completeness 
of  design,  and  in  the  quality  which  most 
matters — sympathetic  interpretation  of  the 
human  heart.  It  is  inferior,  for  reasons 
inseparable  from  the  subject  chosen.  The 
design,  though  equally  complete,  is  far  less 
happy.  Both  books  have  their  origin  in  that 
"  far-reaching  stir  and  rumination  "  whose 
first  output  was  the  Oxford  pamphlet.  In 
both  the  emotions  of  man  and  woman  in  their 
sex-relation  are  connected  with  the  play  and 
counterplay  of  forces  at  work  in  the  religious 
world.  But  in  Helbeck  the  connection  is 
direct  and  causal:  Helbeck  and  Laura's 
love  comes  to  inevitable  ruin  because  in  him 
the  devotion  to  religious  authority  is  no  less 

76 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 

instinctive  than  her  allegiance  to  freedom 
of  the  mind.  In  Eleanor  the  central  male 
figure,  Manisty,  is  a  student  of  religious 
phenomena  ;  he  is  the  upholder  of  religious 
authority,  not  for  the  sake  of  religion,  but 
of  authority ;  because  he  sees  it  bound  up 
with  tradition,  indispensable  to  civilised 
society.  Essentially  he  is  irreligious;  and 
'Eleanor  is  associated  with  him  in  his  work, 
not  for  the  sake  of  the  work,  but  for  the 
association.  The  story  would  have  stood 
almost  as  well  if  Manisty  had  been  writing 
directly  and  primarily  on  politics — for 
instance,  on  the  principle  of  nationality. 
But  at  the  close  religion  enters  directly  as 
an  element :  it  provides  the  solution. 
Casually,  through  her  association  with 
Manisty,  Eleanor  has  been  brought  into 
touch  with  the  Modernist  priest,  Father 
Benecke :  when  she  and  her  unwilling  rival, 
Lucy,  fly  to  concealment,  they  find  them- 
selves sharing  the  retreat  of  the  unfrocked 
priest ;  and  it  is  to  the  martyr  of  freedom 
that  Eleanor  is  drawn  by  the  instinct  for 
confession:    it  is  he  who  points  to  her  the 

77 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


Christian  solution — the  way  of  renunciation. 
All  this  is  well  combined,  ingenious  and 
picturesque ;  it  is  only  to  be  regretted  that 
Mrs  Ward  should  have  marred  the  dignity 
of  her  invention  when  she  makes  Father 
Benecke  vitiate  the  spirit  of  the  confessional 
by  interfering  so  as  to  bring  Manisty  on  the 
scene.  Yet  at  best  the  plot  is  a  grouping  of 
accidents.  In  Helbeck  the  whole  situation 
has  a  commanding  simplicity  though  the 
inevitable  end  is  reached  by  subtle  com- 
plications of  the  path. 

It  is  a  minor  matter  that  Mrs  Waid 
throughout  holds  our  sympathy  for  Helbeck 
and  never  for  an  instant  secures  it  for 
Manisty.  This  means  that  the  book  is 
necessarily  less  likeable :  it  need  not  for  that 
be  less  deserving  praise.  But  what  is 
vitally  important  is  the  relation  of  its  char- 
acters to  their  background.  The  whole 
scene  passes  in  Italy :  it  deals  with  the 
adventures  almost  of  tourists — privileged, 
highly  educated  tourists  who  know  Italian 
and  Italians,  but  folk  for  whom  Italian  life  of 
to-day,  Italy  of  to-day,  with  its  vines  and 

78 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 

olives  overgrowing  the  ruins  of  Rome,  make 
up  a  spectacle.  In  Helbeck,  setting  and  actor 
are  one :  the  scene  has  value  only  in  relation 
to  the  actors.  In  Eleanor  there  is  a  tendency 
to  describe  for  the  sake  of  description  which 
Mrs  Ward  does  not  wholly  resist.  The  story 
of  David  Grieve' s  experiences  in  France  had 
too  much  suggestion  of  the  enlightened  guide- 
'  book ;  here,  in  a  less  degree,  but  still  per- 
ceptible, there  is  the  same  suggestion.  A 
writer  like  Prosper  Me  rime  e — or  even,  in  his 
best  work,  the  late  Mr  Marion  Crawford—1 
describes,  as  it  were,  accidentally.  Mrs  Ward 
makes  you  feel  the  scene  through  the  eyes 
of  people  standing  apart  from  it,  admiririg 
its  beauty  and  its  strangeness.  Not  so  does 
she  describe  Whindale,  or  Bannisdale,  or  any 
other  fell  or  scaur. 

Those  who  wish  to  read  a  description  of 
Italy  as  it  strikes  an  extremely  cultivated, 
even  learned,  Englishwoman,  with  a  keen 
sense  for  beauty,  will  read  Eleanor  with 
interest:  so  will  those  who  desire  well- 
considered  views  on  the  relations  of  Church 
and  State  in  Italy  set  out  in  an  agreeable 

79 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


dramatic  form.  But  these  things  are  too 
detachable  from  the  main  and  real  subject, 
which  is  a  very  powerful  and  subtle  study 
of  jealousy  in  its  least  dishonouring  form, 
and  uncomplicated  by  the  marital  sense  of 
ownership. 

Eleanor  is  the  woman  of  thirty,  with  a 
disastrous  marriage  behind  her,  exquisitely 
cultivated,  full  of  grace  ard  charm,  socially 
well  placed — but  hungry  with  the  need  for 
personal  devotion.  She  finds  life  flowering 
afresh,  her  shattered  nerves  growing  into  a 
harmony,  because  the  chance  has  offered  of 
helping  her  kinsman,  Manisty,  in  the  epoch- 
making  book  which  he  has  left  politics  to 
write.  This  brilliant  person  is  admittedly 
an  unmitigated  egoist ;  but  Mrs  "Ward,  after 
her  fashion,  conveys  the  effect  of  his  brilli- 
ancy by  dexterous  description.  Just  as  in 
Robert  Elsmere  we  had  much  about  the  old 
Squire's  destructive  talk  and  his  biting 
epigrams,  but  were  not  given  the  epigrams 
to  look  at,  so  here  also  Mrs  Ward  tells  us 
how  Manisty  talked;  she  does  not  make 
h\m  say  his  best  things.     It  is  a  defect  in 

80 


HELBECK  AND  ELEANOR 

her  method,  and  we  have  to  take  Manisty, 
like  the  Squire,  on  faith ;  but  what  she 
renders,  and  inimitably,  is  the  quality  of 
Eleanor's  feeling  for  Manisty — that  mixture 
of  pride  and  protecting  tenderness  which  a 
delightful  woman  will  sometimes  display 
towards  an  unbearable  man.  It  is  largely 
for  his  sake — to  propitiate  his  ill-humour 
' — that  she  lays  herself  out  to  make  a  crude 
American  girl  attractive  when  the  household 
is  saddled  with  this,  to  Manisty,  most  un- 
desired  visitor.  It  might  be  said  that  Mrs 
Ward  conveys  more  successfully  Lucy's 
crudeness  than  Lucy's  beauty  ;  but  this,  at 
any  rate,  is  clear,  that  without  Eleanor's 
good-natured  intervention,  Lucy  would 
never  have  become  tolerable  to  Manisty. 
Eleanor  is  the  architect  of  her  own  ruin. 
Once,  however,  we  have  got  to  the  point 
where  the  elder  woman  perceives  what  is 
happening,  criticism  has  no  more  to  say; 
all  the  painting  is  excellent.  Mrs  Ward 
does  not  spare  Eleanor;  she  shows  her  in 
the  pettiness,  the  humiliation,  of  her  passion ; 
and  she  gives  very  fine  relief  to  the  girl's 
J  81 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


response  when  appeal  is  made  to  her  by  the 
vanquished.  Lucy's  anger  with  Manisty  for 
his  ingratitude,  even  when  she  can  scarcely 
suppress  the  exultation  of  her  own  heart, 
is  a  subtle  and  true  study.  Let  us  hope 
that  in  the  long  run,  like  a  true  daughter 
of  America,  she  made  him  black  her  boots. 
As  for  Eleanor,  it  was  her  nature  to  do 
things  for  other  people;  she  transgressed 
it  in  desiring  and  striving  to  hold  something 
for  herself;  and  she  fulfils  the  law  of  her 
being  by  bringing  the  other  two  together, 
and  ther  dying  quietly  and  unobtrusively 
in  a  delicate  atmosphere  of  refined  peace. 
But  Mrs  Ward's  sense  of  poetic  justice  guides 
her  rightly  in  making  the  nice  young  attache 
propose  to  marry  Eleanor  when  Death  had 
already  set  his  mark  on  her.  She  de- 
served that  supreme  compliment,  and  it 
re-establishes  the  balance  of  the  design. 


83 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTOEICAL  BASIS 

AFTER  she  had  written  Eleanor, 
Mrs  Ward  let  the  religious  theme 
alone  for  ten  full  years.  The 
next  three  novels  have  the  common  char- 
acteristic of  being  based  upon  some  well- 
known  piece  of  social  or  political  history. 
All  who  had  read  Sainte  Beuve's  study  of 
Mademoiselle  de  l'Espinasse  must  have 
recognised  the  genesis  of  the  central  incident 
in  Lady  Rose's  Daughter.  What  Julie  de 
l'Espinasse  was  to  Madame  du  Deffand, 
Julie  le  Breton  (the  choice  of  name  is  in  itself 
an  acknowledgment)  was  to  Lady  Henry; 
and  just  as  Madame  du  Deffand,  "  counting 
every  visiter  to  her  salon  as  so  much  private 
property,"  descended  one  afternoon  pre- 
maturely to  find  her  most  valued  circle 
"  gathered  surreptitiously  round  the  lady 
who  passed  as  her  paid  companion,  and  was 

83 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


in  truth  the  illegitimate  half-sister  of  her 
brother's  wife,"  so  the  autocrat  of  Bruton 
Street,  roused  by  indiscreet  voices,  appeared 
— a  formidable  spectre — at  the  door  of  a 
room  where  Julie  le  Breton  was  entertaining 
the  personages  who  had  called  to  inquire 
after  Lady  Henry's  health.  These  person- 
ages are  characterised  in  a  manner  which 
would  naturally  suggest  to  the  London  world 
sketches  of  well-known  folk.  All  this  part 
of  the  book — the  description  of  Lady  Henry's 
salon,  of  Julie's  personality,  of  her  friends, 
of  the  relations  between  her  and  her  em- 
ployer— is  brilliantly  done;  but  after  the 
rupture,  when  Julie  sets  up  house  for  herself 
and  the  interest  shifts  to  her  tragic  love  story 
and  eventual  decline  into  a  duchess-ship,  the 
whole  thing  lags  and  flags.  Mrs  Ward 
herself  says  the  end  should  have  been 
tragedy,  and  she  is  right.  Lady  Henry's 
brief  reappearance  at  the  end  makes  us  feel 
how  pasteboard  are  the  other  figures ;  that 
grim  potentate  brings  life  whenever  she 
enters,  and  the  breath  of  battle. 
The    Marriage    of    William    Ashe    also 

84 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTOKICAL  BASIS 

"  took  the  outlines  of  another  story,  or 
rather  the  situation  from  which  it  sprang, 
and  invoked,  so  to  speak,  a  set  of  modern 
players,  to  play  it  out  again,  in  modern 
fashion  and  under  contemporary  conditions. " 
But  this  time  the  story  was  by  far  better 
known,  for  it  was  a  part  of  Byron's  career, 
and,  to  that  extent,  Mrs  Ward  had  greater 
-  difficulties  to  contend  with.  None  the  less 
she  succeeded  very  much  better.  Lady 
Kitty,  who  modernises  the  part  of  Lady 
Caroline  Lamb,  is  really  created;  she  has 
"  the  lightness,  the  fantasy,"  which  her 
author  sought  to  convey.  This  elfish 
creature,  so  small,  yet  so  violent,  with  an 
uncanny,  insane  passion  of  will — "  made  up 
on  wires,"  as  an  enemy  describes  her — has 
none  the  less  a  dazzling  magic,  of  youth  and 
of  something  more — a  double  dose  of  life. 
Geoffrey  Cliffe,  who  is  cast  for  the  part  of 
Byron,  has  Byron's  meanness,  but  very  little 
of  his  stormy  grandeur:  but  to  remake  a 
Byron,  a  Bismarck,  a  Shelley,  a  Napoleon,  is 
an  achievement  past  praying  for.  As  well 
put  Othello  or  Falstaff  into  the  pages  of  a 

85 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


modern  book :  these  creations  were  stamped 
once  and  for  all  on  the  common  conscious- 
ness. Mrs  Ward,  to  do  her  justice,  has  seen 
this.  She  allots  to  her  Cliffe  a  secondary 
role:  the  strength  of  her  design  is  given 
to  representing  Lady  Caroline's  husband, 
Lord  Melbourne,  in  his  youth.  Here  again 
she  has  succeeded  beyond  her  usual  measure. 
The  William  Lamb  of  reality  has  well  in- 
spired her  study  of  the  English  aristocrat, 
good-humoured,  indifferent,  yet  born  to 
power  and  attracted  by  power — and  at  the 
same  time  possessing  enough  originality  to 
win  and  be  won  by  the  bewitching  goddess 
whose  apparition  at  a  great  ball  is  among 
the  things  which  Mrs  Ward  has  really  made 
us  see.  Lady  Kitty's  tempestuous  pre- 
parations for  the  robing  of  herself  as  an 
eighteenth-century  Diana  and  her  final 
triumph  in  that  guise  leave  a  sharp  outline 
on  memory. 

Incidentally  Mrs  Ward  has  chosen  to 
sketch,  with  some  definiteness,  a  social  phase 
of  the  nineties :  she  fixes  it  to  a  date  by  a 
thumb-nail  sketch  of  Mr  Gladstone  in  old 

86 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTORICAL  BASIS 

age.  Thus  her  book  is  a  roman  more  or  less 
a  clef  in  relation  to  contemporary  life  as  well 
as  to  past  history,  though  without  any  trace 
of  the  indiscretion  which  beset  her  heroine, 
and  the  heroine's  original. 

It  is  a  defect  in  Mrs  Ward's  story  that  she 
makes  Lady  Kitty's  final  plunge  or  trans- 
^  gression  the  result  of  an  arbitrary  and  exter- 
nal happening.  When  she  is  on  her  way  to 
rejoin  her  husband,  Cliffe  is  guided  to  pursue 
her;  but  for  the  treachery  of  an  angry 
woman,  Lady  Kitty,  we  are  asked  to  believe, 
would  never  have  gone  beyond  indiscretion. 
This  is  a  touch  of  melodrama  and  of  bad 
invention ;  but  so  little  reliance  is  placed  on 
it  that  the  defect  does  not  really  signify. 
In  the  next  book  a  similar  introduction  of 
mechanical  plots  ruins  the  value  of  the  whole 
work,  for  the  whole  story  hinges  on  it. 
FenwicFs  Career  is  suggested  by  the  case  of 
George  Romney,  who  left  his  wife  to  come 
to  London  and  seek  his  fortune,  but  never 
returned  to  her  or  brought  her  to  him, 
and  fell  in  love,  as  the  story  goes,  with  the 
most  beautiful  of  his  sitters,  Lady  Hamilton. 

87 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


This  theme  Mrs  Ward  waters  down.  Fenwick 
comes  up,  and  is  led  to  conceal  his  marriage 
to  the  extent  of  not  avowing  it.  His  wife 
learns  this,  is  jealous,  comes  to  London, 
finds  the  studio  empty — because  Fenwick, 
having  just  sold  his  first  important  picture, 
has  gone  out  to  make  purchases  which  shall 
compensate  her  for  her  waiting.  Conspicu- 
ous on  the  easel  is  a  portrait  of  the  sitter 
whom  already  Phoebe  Fenwick  has  come  to 
suspect  as  her  supplanter.  She  destroys  the 
canvas,  leaves  an  angry  letter  and  her 
wedding-ring,  and  vanishes  out  of  Fenwick' s 
life.  Things,  after  all,  do  not  happen  like 
that;  the  plot  is  incredible.  Indeed,  the 
novel  does  not  at  any  part  show  Mrs  Ward 
to  advantage,  though  it  displays  her  famili- 
arity with  the  world  of  painters  and  their 
patrons,  with  the  talk  of  artists  and  of 
critics,  and  instructs  her  readers  in  the 
general  artistic  movements  and  tendencies 
which  have  made  themselves  felt  since  Millais 
and  Burne-Jones  grew  old-fashioned,  and 
even  Whistler  a  trifle  out  of  date.  There 
is  also  much  description  of  Versailles,  careful 

'88 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTORICAL  BASIS 

but  somewhat  redundant.  The  truth  is  that 
a  story  about  artists  or  about  literary 
people  is  seldom  fully  alive:  it  becomes 
infected  with  an  atmosphere  of  technicalities, 
which  lacks  interest  for  the  general  reader, 
and  to  the  expert  appeals  rather  as  a  dis- 
cussion of  ideas  than  as  a  presentment  of 
life. 

These  objections  do  not  apply  to  the  use 
of  a  political  background  for  the  warp  on 
which  to  weave  the  pattern  of  a  story. 
Politics  are  less  technical,  less  esoteric ;  they 
are,  in  a  sense,  everybody's  business;  and 
though  they  most  certainly  have  their 
"  shop,"  novelists  have,  as  a  rule,  contrived 
sufficiently  to  avoid  it.  In  the  book  which 
followed  FenwicFs  Career  Mrs  Ward  drew 
with  excellent  result  on  this  field  of  interest. 
Diana  Mallory  is  certainly  not  a  great  novel, 
but  it  is  a  very  good  one.  The  story  is 
original  and  well  planned,  and  several  of 
the  personages  are  really  alive.  More- 
over, though  a  novel  of  political  life,  it  is 
without  the  propagandist  note ;  it  uses  a 
politician's  career  simply  as  the  material 

89 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


for  an  artist.  Of  course  views  and  opinions 
are  felt  behind  the  telling,  but  they  are  not 
obtruded.  Oliver  Markham  is  a  young  and 
rising  Member  of  Parliament  on  the  Radical 
side;  he  commands  great  wealth,  because 
his  father's  huge  fortune  has  been  left  entirely 
to  his  mother,  and  Lady  Lucy  Markham 
does  everything  she  can  to  advance  his  son's 
fortunes  and  to  forward  his  ideas.  Conse- 
quently, when  Markham  falls  in  love  with 
Diana,  the  beautiful  girl  who  had  taken  an 
old  place  near  his  own,  all  goes  well.  Diana, 
it  is  true,  is  a  natural-born  Tory  and  Im- 
perialist. She  has  been  brought  up  entirely 
abroad  by  her  father,  a  traveller  and  a 
student,  with  the  cult  of  empire  strong  in 
him;  and  knowing  England  only  at  a  dis- 
tance, she  adores  it  the  more.  But  the  veiy 
encounter  in  which  she  contends  brilliantly 
against  the  trained  and  able  parliamentarian 
reveals  to  each  the  other's  charm ;  and  Lady 
Lucy  Markham,  though  she  is  a  Liberal  by 
tradition,  and  also  by  affection,  because 
Ferrier,  one  of  the  Liberal  leaders,  has  made 
her  his  Egeria,  sees  no  reason  not  to  welcome 

90 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTOKICAL  BASIS 

her  son's  choice.  But  on  the  very  day  of 
Markham's  declaration  the  ominous  mystery 
of  Diana's  parentage,  which  has  been  skil- 
fully suggested,  suddenly  breaks.  She  is 
the  child  of  a  woman  who  was  sentenced  to 
death  for  murder,  with  fraud  thrown  in — 
the  tragic  heroine  and  victim  in  a  case  which 
had  resounded  over  Europe  and  America. 
Upon  this  announcement  Markham  is  a  little 
dashed ;  he  perceives  that  such  a  marriage 
has  danger  for  a  political  career ;  but  he  de- 
termines to  hold  fast,  and  is  backed  strenu- 
ously by  one  of  his  friends,  the  great  lawyer 
who  defended  the  accused  woman,  and  never 
departed  from  his  belief  that  she  had  been 
guilty  of  no  more  than  a  gambler's  madness 
and  a  chance  blow  struck  in  self-defence. 
Mrs  Ward,  it  is  to  be  seen,  does  not  go  to  all 
lengths  in  her  scheme ;  the  charming  girl 
is  not  the  child  of  a  hateful  criminal ;  and, 
after  all,  this  is  common  sense,  because 
hateful  criminals  do  not  have  charming 
children.  In  short,  the  circumstances  are 
such  that  Markham  could  have  stuck  to  his 
choice  without  political  disadvantage,  perhaps 

91 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


gained   even   the  prestige  of   a  chivalrous 
adventure.    But  he  has  more  to  face.    Lady 
Lucy  will  have  none  of  the  marriage ;    she 
has  the  power  to  deprive   him  absolutely 
of  money,  and   she  declares  her  intention 
to  do  so— in  the  name  of  Christianity  and 
respectability  and  the  purity  of  the  home. 
Very  deep  in  Mrs  Ward's  heart  lies  the  con- 
viction that  women  are  not  to  be  trusted 
with  power ;  that  they  will  take  no  account 
of  other  people  in  their  use  of  it;    that  it 
spoils  them  for  their  proper  uses.     Here  the 
conviction  is  only  suggested ;    elsewhere,  as 
shall  be  seen,  it  is  heavily  underlined.     At 
all  events,   Markham,   unable  to   face  the 
sacrifice  of  thirty  thousand  a  year  and  prob- 
able  retirement    from    Parliament,    allows 
Diana    to    release    him.      Politically,    the 
manoeuvre  does  not  pay ;   public  sympathy 
goes  to  Diana ;    and  Markham,  going  from 
one  meanness  to  another,  commits  an  act 
■of    treachery    to    Ferrier,    his    friend    and 
political  chief,  which  completes  his  own  over- 
throw.    All  the  construction  of  this  intrigue 
is  thoroughly  well  planned,  the  sequence 

92 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTORICAL  BASIS 

from  action  to  action  is  clear,  yet  not  obvious ; 
and  finally  Nemesis  overtakes  the  intriguer 
in  the  appropriate  form  of  an  electioneering 
missile  which  damages  his  spine.  Diana  is 
then  allowed  to  come  to  the  rescue,  morally 
and  physically,  of  the  disgraced  and  de- 
feated man  who  still  sums  up  for  her  all  that 
she  wants  of  the  world. 
'  Diana  is  really  admirable.  She  has  spirit, 
fire,  breeding  and  dignity;  she  has  some- 
thing of  the  airy  grace  which  Mrs  Ward 
contrives  to  give  to  such  different  personages 
as  Eleanor  and  Lady  Kitty;  and  here  the 
novelist  has  managed  to  convey  to  the  full 
a  suggestion  of  beauty,  and  of  a  girl  very 
passionately  in  love.  Where  she  has  failed 
absolutely — and  the  failure  is  characteristic 
— is  the  picture  set  against  Diana,  that  of 
Alicia  Drake,  Markham's  cousin,  who  catches 
him  on  the  rebound  from  Diana,  and  drops 
him  again  when  he  is  damaged.  Alicia  is 
meant  to  be  the  unscrupulous  woman  who 
makes  an  appeal  to  sense ;  but  she  is  merely 
a  lay  figure.  On  the  other  hand,  Fanny 
Merton,  Diana's  vulgar  and  disgusting  little 

93 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


cousin,  the  mean  agent  of  Fate  who  brings 
Diana  face  to  face  with  her  own  history,  is 
vividly    drawn,    though   this    is   no   great 
achievement.     But  Mrs  Ward  has  attempted 
something  very   difficult  in  her   study  of 
Ferrier,  the  famous  politician,  and  of  his 
friend,  Sir  James  Chide,  the  great  advocate. 
In  both  these  cases  notable  figures  in  real 
life  suggest  themselves  for  comparison,  and 
Mrs  Ward  has  gone  out  of  her  way  to  indicate 
that  in  drawing  the  lawyer  she  had  Lord 
Russell  of  Killowen  in  her  mind.     This  may 
have  been  simply  as  a   way  of  pointing 
memory  to  the  celebrated  Maybrick  case,  for 
Sir  James  Chide  bears  no  resemblance  to  the 
Irish  lawyer  who  was  so  long  the  terror  and 
the   glory   of   the   Bar.     Both   Chide   and 
Ferrier  have  dignity  and  weight  of  person- 
ality.    Over  and  above  these  should  be  noted 
an  excellent  figure,  the  sharp-tongued  old 
'  Lady  Niton,  who  is  seen  in  the  light  of 
laughter,  and  whose  conversation,  as  given 
in  the  book,  is  for  once  not  unequal  to  the 
description  of  its  effects. 
Here  again,  it  should  also  be  observed,  we 

94 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTORICAL  BASIS 

find  Mrs  Ward's  characteristic  feeling  for 
houses  as  an  external  expression  of  person- 
ality. The  charm  which  Beechcote  has  for 
Diana,  and  the  charm  she  imparts  to  it — 
the  effect  of  Markham's  house  and  the  bad 
taste  it  expresses — these  are  meant  to  be 
felt,  and  indeed  are  felt,  throughout  the  whole 
story  almost  as  living  human  influences. 

Houses  and  furnishing  also  play  a  great 
part  in  the  next  novel,  Daphne,  which  is,  in 
truth,  not  a  novel  at  all,  but  a  pamphlet — a 
strident  pamphlet  against  the  institution  of 
divorce,  at  least  as  it  obtains  in  America. 
Here  for  once  Mrs  Ward  loses  her  judicial 
temper ;  she  gives  the  opposition  no  sort  of 
fair  play ;  and  it  cannot  be  said  that  the 
book  has  in  any  sense  much  value.  But 
it  is  worth  while  to  emphasise  once  again 
Mrs  Ward's  sense  of  the  danger  which  power 
brings  to  women.  Daphne,  the  millionaire 
in  her  own  right,  feels  that  she  has  a  special 
claim  against  her  impecunious  husband ; 
and,  Mrs  Ward  suggests,  American  law  adds 
to  the  dangers  of  power  by  the  facility  which 
it  gives  for  money  to  have  its  own  way. 

95 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


In  her  Preface  to  the  Westmoreland 
Edition  of  this  book  Mrs  Ward  apologises 
to  Americans  for  a  novel  written  after  a 
visit  to  their  country,  and  expressing  on 
the  whole  a  condemnation — in  spite  of 
the  chapters  which  celebrate  Washington 
and  the  hero  who  gave  the  capital  his  name. 
She  appeals  to  the  portrait  of  Lucy  Foster  in 
Eleanor  for  a  true  presentment  of  her  feeling 
to  the  kindred  race  in  the  New  World.  Yet 
what  she  admires  in  Lucy  is  precisely  the 
old-world  America — old-world  even  in  its 
independence.  Daphne  is  the  American 
Europeanised,  a  figure  much  more  up  to 
date  than  Lucy.  One  has  to  turn  to  another 
book  for  Mrs  Ward's  recognition  of  the 
glory  of  newness,  the  vast  unbroken  forces 
which  America's  continent  is  throwing  into 
the  balance  of  our  modern  world ;  and  it  is 
not  with  the  United  States  that  she  associ- 
ates her  picture  of  them,  but  with  Canada. 

Yet  Canadian  Born,  published  in  1910, 
cannot  be  numbered  amongst  her  successes. 
Mrs  Ward  having  made  a  tour  through 
Canada — as  a  traveller  with  rather  too  many 

96 


NOVELS  WITH  A  HISTORICAL  BASIS 

facilities  and  advantages — grouped  her  im- 
pressions of  travel  about  a  loose  thread  of 
story :  it  was  a  fashion  of  writing  that  the 
late  William  Black  used  with  unfailing 
charm.  But  in  Mrs  Ward's  book,  through  all 
the  keen  pleasure  and  interest  in  what  she 
has  seen,  one  detects  the  voice  of  the  publicist 
formulating  views.  A  little  thing  would 
change  many  of  the  scenes,  many  of  the 
dialogues,  into  excellent  leading  articles. 


97 


VI 

THE  CASE  OF  RICHARD  MEYNELL 

MRS  WARD'S  dramatic  tracts  on 
divorce,  even  her  excursions  into 
the  field  of  Imperial  politics,  are, 
in  a  certain  sense,  superficial:  they  bring 
us  into  touch  only  with  the  surface  of  the 
writer's  mind.  In  The  Case  of  Richard 
Meynell  she  returned  to  that  deeper  pre- 
possession which  has  never  left  her  since 
it  inspired  her  first  achievement.  It  has 
been  seen  how  Robert  Elsmere  owed  its  birth 
to  a  movement  of  revolt — revolt  against 
a  Bampton  Lecture ! — and  how  that  revolt 
sought  its  utterance  in  a  pamphlet,  and  how 
years  later  the  pamphlet  ripened  into  a 
novel,  which  put  the  thesis  of  the  pamphlet 
as  a  concrete  human  case.  If  Robert 
Elsmere  disbelieved,  was  it  only  (as  the 
Bampton  lecturer  would  suggest)  through 
spiritual  pride  or  some  other  unchristian 

98 


RICHARD  MEYNELL 


quality  ?  That  is  the  question  which  the 
book  was  written  to  answer.  But  beside  it 
ran  the  other  question:  Are  the  things 
which  Elsmere  cannot  believe  things  essential 
to  Christianity  ?  Now,  after  twenty  years, 
Mrs  Ward  returns  to  these  problems,  and  it 
is  apparent  that  in  her  view  the  first  question 
t  no  longer  needs  to  be  put.  No  one,  she 
would  say,  disputes  that  persons  in  the 
Christian  community  living  good  and  even 
exemplary  lives  hold  views  as  difficult  to 
reconcile  with  the  letter  of  the  Creed  as  are 
the  tenets  of  an  extreme  ritualist  with  the 
Thirty-Nine  Articles.  Her  question  now 
frames  itself  rather  in  this  form:  Has  the 
Christian  a  right  to  assert  views  which 
involve  wide  modification  of  Christianity's 
intellectual  framework?  Obviously  this  is 
an  inquiry  by  far  more  polemical.  In 
Robert  Elsmere  her  task  was  simply  to  show 
that  a  good  man  might  in  all  honour  and 
sincerity,  and  against  every  pull  of  his 
nature,  feel  himself  driven  to  conclusions  at 
variance  with  those  of  his  Church.  The 
problem  raised  by  Richard  Meynell  is  less 

99 


MES  HUMPHRY  WARD 


human:  and  in  answering  her  question 
Mrs  Ward  must  assume  the  role  of  a 
prophetess,  picturing  in  advance  not  a 
secession  but  a  struggle  within  the  Church 
of  England. 

That  forecast  will  interest  all  who  care  for 
such  matters;  but  as  a  novel  the  book 
sutlers  by  lack  of  any  contest  within  the 
hero's  mind:  there  is  no  essential  drama. 
Mrs  Ward  tries  to  meet  this  lack  by  inventing 
a  plot,  to  me  wholly  incredible,  which  forces 
upon  Meynell  a  certain  choice  arising  out 
of  extraneous  happenings.  The  struggle  in 
Elsmere's  case  is  inevitable,  inseparable  from 
his  position;  but  because  a  novel  ought 
to  have  a  plot,  Meynell  is  grouped  with  a 
set  of  people  each  and  all  of  whom  have 
acted  with  criminal  folly,  and  so  force  him 
to  decide  between  his  private  honour  and 
his  public  mission.  Yet  all  this  is,  in  reality, 
padding.  What  Mrs  Ward  has  wanted  to  do 
in  writing  the  book  has  been  to  project  her- 
self into  an  imaginary  contest  of  Modernist 
Anglicans  against  Anglican  orthodoxy ;  to 
invent  the  situations  that  might  arise,  the 

100 


RICHARD  MEYNELL 


weapons  that  might  be  used,  and  above  all 
the  sermons  that  might  be  preached. 

In  Robert  Elsmere  Robert's  true  antagonist 
is  Catherine;  in  Helbeck  the  opposition 
between  Laura  and  her  lover  makes  the 
whole  theme;  but  Meynell's  fortunes  and 
sympathies  link  him  with  Elsmere' s  daughter, 
and  she  instinctively  takes  his  side.  His 
•  real  opponent  is  the  saintly  old  bishop  who 
rejoices  manfully  when  the  arbitrary  accident 
of  a  scandal  is  cleared  out  of  the  way  and 
a  clean  fight  is  open.  In  other  words,  the 
plot  of  this  book  concerns  Meynell's  life 
and  belief  only  by  chance :  in  the  other  two 
novels  Helbeck  and  Elsmere  are  carried 
inevitably  forward  to  dramatic  conflict  by 
the  facts  of  their  own  faith. 

All  this  is  not  to  underrate  the  value  which 
the  book  may  have  as  eloquent,  learned  and 
feeling  exposition  of  matters  which  deeply 
concern  many  serious  minds.  But  in  this 
case  the  form  of  the  novel  is  used  as  a  vehicle 
for  exposition ;  in  the  other  two,  exposition 
in  some  measure  was  exposition  of  the  plot 
itself.     Speaking  critically,  Richard  MeyneU 

101 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


adds  nothing  to  Mrs  Ward's  literary  reputa- 
tion. From  a  more  general  point  of  view, 
the  book  may  be  taken  to  indicate  her  con- 
viction that  Robert  Elsmere  has  borne  fruit : 
that  the  controversy  and  the  propaganda, 
which  it  helped  notably  to  bring  home  to 
many  minds,  have  resulted  in  a  great  ad- 
vance towards  the  conclusion  which  she 
desires ;  and  that  those  who,  like  herself, 
crave  for  a  Church  which  shall  satisfy  their 
instinct  for  tradition,  for  beauty,  and  for 
mystery,  without  repelling  their  intellectual 
convictions,  are  justified  in  hoping  for  a 
realisation  of  their  desire.  It  does  not  con- 
sist with  the  purpose  of  this  critical  study  to 
examine  into  these  opinions.  Note  should 
simply  be  taken  of  the  fact  that  Mrs  Ward's 
hope  rests  to-day  in  what  is  passing  not  so 
much  within  the  Church  of  England  as  in 
a  wider  sphere,  in  the  Modernist  movement 
pervading  a  Catholicism  which  may  become 
more  catholic  in  ceasing  to  be  Roman. 


102 


VII 

LATER  NOVELS  AND  GENERAL 
APPRECIATION 

^  M  ^HE  Case  of  Richard  Meynell  was  the 
I  last  volume  in  the  collected  edition 
-*■  of  Mrs  Ward's  works:  but  since 
then  she  has  added  considerably  to  her 
output.  Not  much  importance  need  be 
attached  to  her  Mating  of  Lydia,  a  novel 
hinging  on  the  character  ( for  which  rumour 
suggests  an  original)  of  an  old  and  in- 
famous landlord  who  shuts  himself  up  with 
hoards  of  choice  treasure,  masterpieces  of 
many  arts.  The  subject  lends  itself  to  the 
erudition  of  Mrs  Ward's  connoisseurship : 
yet  the  result  is  a  somewhat  melodramatic 
and  mediocre  story,  lit  up  at  points  by  that 
odd  quality  of  intermittent  vision  which  has 
been  already  noted.  The  opening  chapters 
that  describe  Melrose's  appearance  at  his 
bleak  northern  home  with  his  scared  and 

103 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


bullied  little  Italian  wife  are  vivid  enough ; 
then  the  book  flags,  dealing  with  vaguely 
indicated  persons,  whose  actions  are  described 
in  a  manner  to  suggest  certain  problems 
and  difficulties — when  suddenly  into  the 
middle  of  them  walks  an  astonishing  crea- 
ture with  a  distinct  life  of  her  own,  who  might 
have  dropped  from  the  clouds,  but  who 
evidently  and  unmistakably  is  there  and 
is  alive.  This  is  the  miserly  old  tyrant's 
daughter,  the  cross-bred  Italian  girl,  reared 
in  poverty  by  strange  shifts,  big-eyed,  help- 
less and  pathetic  as  a  hurt  animal,  and  using 
her  helplessness  as  a  weapon  with  formidable 
tenacity.  Undoubtedly  some  elf  presented 
Mrs  Ward  with  that  vision ;  she  is  the  pro- 
duct of  a  genuine  creative  power  not  yet 
spent — the  same  power  which  in  its  earlier 
vigour  created  David  Grieve' s  sister. 

If,  however,  there  were  any  question  as 
to  the  durability  of  Mrs  Ward's  gift,  her  next 
story  would  have  settled  it.  The  Coryston 
Family  is  a  telling  study  of  contemporary 
England  in  those  phases  of  it  which  specially 
interest  her — concerned  with  the  classes  in 

104 


LATEE  NOVELS 


which,  power  resides — that  is  to  say,  the  rich, 
hereditary  landlords  who  have  the  taste  for 
government,  and  the  picked  politicians  who 
have  forced  their  way  into  the  privileged 
ring.  Briefly,  the  work  is  a  study  in  honest 
tyranny,  and  a  study  the  more  interesting 
because  it  is  not  dominated  by  any  thesis — 
except  in  so  far  as  it  reinforces  the  opinion 
that  women  ought  not  to  have  control  over 
men.  Lady  Coryston,  like  Lady  Lucy 
Markham  in  Diana  MaUory,  has  been  left 
with  plenary  powers  over  great  revenues; 
but,  unlike  Lady  Lucy,  she  has  views  of 
her  own  to  advance.  Her  husband  has  been 
rather  her  mouthpiece  than  a  politician  in 
his  own  right,  and  she  has  now  trained  her 
favourite  son  and  got  him  into  Parliament 
at  a  moment  when  political  divisions  have 
come  almost  to  the  pitch  of  civil  strife — in 
short,  in  the  England  of  1913.  The  story 
opens  with  a  sketch  of  Lady  Coryston  in  the 
Speaker's  Gallery  awaiting  her  son's  maiden 
speech ;  and  the  atmosphere  of  that  queer, 
dim,  railed-off  side-chapel  to  St  Stephen's 
(opening  on  it  as  if  by  a  kind  of  leper's 

105 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


"squint")  is  cleverly  rendered.  But  this 
is  only  a  prelude  to  the  brilliant  scene  which 
indicates  the  nodus  of  the  story.  Lady 
Coryston's  eldest  son,  the  holder  of  the  title, 
has  launched  himself  into  the  controversies 
of  the  moment  on  the  extreme  Socialist  wing. 
She  has  summoned  her  children — three  sons 
and  one  daughter — for  a  family  council : 
and  the  council  meets.  Admirably  done  is 
the  whole  of  this  encounter.  Lady  Coryston 
proposes  to  settle  the  whole  estate — some 
seventy  thousand  a  year — upon  her  younger 
son,  the  Tory  member,  buying  off  Lord 
Coryston  by  an  immediate  gift  equal  to  a 
tithe  of  what  would  have  been  his.  Coryston 
refuses.  It  must  be  all  or  nothing.  Either 
he  will  have  all  the  property  which  would 
naturally  have  come  to  him,  or  none  of  it. 
But  in  either  case  he  proposes  to  manage  it ; 
he  will  settle  on  the  estate  and  "  try  to 
drum  a  few  sound  ideas  into  the  minds  of 
our  farmers  and  labourers."  He  will  declare 
war,  in  short,  not  only  on  his  mother's  party 
in  general,  but  upon  his  mother  herself 
within  her  own  kingdom.    Lady  Coryston 

106 


LATER  NOVELS 


accepts  the  challenge,  but  she  soon  finds  that 
the  battle  is  to  be  more  serious  than  she 
reckoned.  Her  agent — her  pearl  of  agents 
— comes  to  her  with  the  news  that  Lord 
Coryston  has  taken  up,  in  Lady  Coryston's 
own  village,  the  quarrel  of  the  Baptists,  to 
whom  she  has  refused  ground  for  a  chapel 
because  their  minister  holds  Radical  opinions. 
Obviously  this  was  a  good  stick  for  an 
agitator  to  get  hold  of,  and  the  agent  asks 
whether  his  employer  adheres  to  her  refusal. 
She,  of  course,  is  not  to  be  intimidated. 

"  The  agent's  mind  let  loose  a  thought 
to  the  effect  that  the  increasing  influence 
of  women  in  politics  did  not  seem  likely 
to  lead  to  peaceful  living.  His  long  ex- 
perience of  Lady  Coryston,  able  as  she  was, 
and  as  he  admitted  her  to  be  in  many 
respects,  had  in  the  end  only  increased  in 
him  a  secret  contempt  for  women  inbred  in 
all  but  a  minority  of  men.  They  seemed 
to  him  to  have  so  little  power  of  playing  the 
game — the  old  game  of  success  that  men 
understand  so  well:  through  compromise, 
cunning,  give  and  take,  shrewd  and  prudent 
dealing." 

107 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


The  agent's  view  is  not  precisely  that  of 
Mrs  Ward,  but  she  appears  to  lean  to  the 
opinion  that  if  women  step  outside  their 
own  sphere  they  do  lack  reasonableness  and 
the  power  of  adjustment — which  is  another 
name  for  the  art  of  compromise.  Lady 
Coryston's  troubles  are  only  beginning  when 
she  quarrels  with  her  eldest  son.  Her 
youngest,  the  promising  Tory,  has  fallen  in 
love  with  a  daughter  of  the  Philistines — 
with  a  daughter,  indeed,  of  the  Chancellor 
of  the  Exchequer  (so  near  does  Mrs  Ward 
go  in  her  presentment  of  the  situation)  "  the 
most  vigorously  hated  and  ardently  followed 
man  of  the  moment."  Here,  however,  the 
resemblance  stops :  the  Glenwilliam  of  the 
book  does  not  in  any  degree  resemble  Mr 
Lloyd  George.  The  daughter,  his  comrade 
and  champion,  is  a  personality  in  her  own 
right ;  and  we  are  given  to  understand  that 
one  reason  why  Enid  Glenwilliam  wishes  to 
have  Arthur  Coryston  at  her  feet  is  because 
Lady  Coryston  has  been  publicly  rude  to  her 
father.  The  approach  of  Nemesis  is  unsus- 
pected by  its  victim:     Mrs  Ward  makes  ua 

108 


LATER  NOVELS 


feel  that  Lady  Coryston  is  too  busy  with 
political  campaigning  to  keep  in  touch  with 
the  lesser  fortunes  of  her  own  family.  When 
her  daughter  becomes  engaged  she  insists 
that  the  "  marriage  shall  be  over  in  good 
time  to  leave  people  free  for  the  General 
Election"  ;  and  in  all  this  there  is  no  hint 
of  caricature :  Lady  Coryston  is  perfectly 
credible — the  domineering  woman  whose  will 
has  flung  itself  into  a  particular  activity  at  a 
moment  of  great  crisis.  But  her  daughter, 
used  to  one  tyranny,  begins  to  find  herself 
menaced  by  another  far  mofe  intimate  and 
formidable.  Marcia's  lover  is  the  heir  of 
rich  and  devout  people,  model  landlords, 
who  wish  that  their  villages  shall  be 
model  villages.  The  punishment  for  offence 
against  the  moral  law  is  expulsion;  and 
it  appears  that  a  chief  servant  of  the  New- 
burys  has  transgressed.  He  has  married 
a  divorced  woman — to  devout  Anglican 
Catholics  no  marriage  at  all.  With  perfect 
sincerity  of  conviction  his  employers,  the 
lords  territorial  of  the  village,  declare  that 
to  him  also  the  law  must  apply.     It  matters 

109 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


nothing  that  his  conscience  as  well  as 
his  heart  justifies  what  he  has  done — that 
the  marriage  has  been  an  act,  not  only 
of  love,  but  of  wise  Christian  charity. 
The  Newbury  family  will  not  consent  to 
connive,  however  obscurely,  at  such  a  com- 
promise, or  at  such  a  recantation;  and 
Marcia,  who,  through  the  agency  of  her 
brother  Coryston,  is  dragged  into  the  affair, 
finds  herself  face  to  face  (like  Laura  in 
Hdbeck)  with  a  spiritual  law  to  which  she 
cannot  reconcile  her  soul.  She,  too,  like 
Laura,  feels  the  fascination  of  her  lover's 
absolute  mystical  faith,  feels  the  desire  to 
submit,  but,  again  like  Laura,  cannot  bring 
herself  to  it.  Less  tragically,  no  doubt,  she 
too  revolts  against  tyranny,  the  invasion  of 
her  conscience  in  its  stronghold :  and,  with 
a  fine  touch  of  irony,  Mrs  Ward  indicates 
that  Lady  Coryston  does  not  disapprove  her 
daughter's  revolt.  Tyranny  of  this  sort, 
based  on  a  mystical  idea,  offends  the  great 
lady's  strong  common-sense.  Her  own 
fight,  which  she  wages  by  similar  methods,  is 
a  political  battle  for  the  traditional  rights 

110 


LATER  NOVELS 


and  privileges  of  her  own  class.  The  crisis 
of  the  book  comes  when  Lady  Coryston  is 
faced  with  her  son  Arthur's  apostasy.  Very 
characteristically  her  lifelong  habit  of 
domination  brushes  aside  the  young  man's 
avowal  of  his  desire  to  marry  Glenwilliam's 
daughter ;  she  takes  the  matter  into  her 
own  hands  at  once,  and  goes  off  to  interview 
the  girl. 

The  scene  that  follows  is  one  of  the  best 
that  Mrs  Ward  has  ever  written.  Lady 
Coryston' s  utter  discomfiture — predicted  by 
her  rebel  eldest  son — does  not  deprive  her  of 
dignity ;  and  the  lapse  into  a  human  con- 
fession of  sorrow,  which  softens  her  opponent 
at  the  finish,  is  admirably  put  in.  What 
finally  weakens  the  fierce  woman — for  she 
cannot  bend — is  the  angry  revolt  of  her 
favourite,  Arthur,  who  shows  up  meanly  in 
his  anger :  it  is  Coryston  the  rebel  who  has 
most  understanding  of  his  mother,  and,  in 
the  end,  most  power  to  reconcile  what  is 
left  of  her  to  defeat. 

The  study  of  this  very  curious  and  inter- 
esting masculine  type  makes  one  feel  that 

111 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


Mrs  Ward  has  been  thinking ;  for  the  char- 
acterisation of  Lord  Coryston  has  insight  as 
well  as  wit ;  it  recognises  the  value  of  the 
inborn  Radical. 

"  He  was  one  of  the  mercurial  men  who 
exist  to  keep  the  human  tide  in  movement. 
Their  opinions  matter  principally  because 
without  them  the  opinions  of  other  men 
would  not  exist.  Their  function  is  to  pro- 
voke, and  from  the  time  he  was  a  babe  in 
the  nursery  Coryston  had  fulfilled  it  to  per- 
fection." 

The  opinions  which  Lord  Coryston  seeks 
to  advance  are  hostile  to  the  existence  of 
landlord  power.  He  is  an  enemy  of  despot- 
ism in  all  its  forms — whether  the  motive  be 
a  desire  to  enforce  a  Churchman's  honest 
creed  as  to  the  marriage  of  divorced  persons, 
or  a  purely  political  conservatism ;  or  again, 
the  mere  oppressive  cruelty  of  a  petty 
Liberal  tradesman  who  exercises  harshly  his 
right  of  property  to  evict.  One  is  almost 
inclined  to  believe  that  Mrs  Ward  is  less 
convinced  than  before  of  the  rights  which 

112 


LATER  NOVELS 


property  confers ;  and  at  least  it  is  certain 
that  she  regards  the  Lady  Corystons  of  this 
world  and  their  allies  as  defending  a  hopeless 
position.  She  anticipates,  that  is,  defeat 
for  the  side  which  has  most  of  her  sympathies. 

"  How  much  longer  will  this  rich,  leisurely 
and  aristocratic  class,  with  all  its  still  sur- 
viving power  and  privilege,  exist  among  us  ? 
It  is  something  that  is  obviously  in  process 
of  transmutation  and  decay,  though  in  a 
country  like  England  the  process  will  be  a 
very  slow  one.  Personally  I  greatly  prefer 
this  landlord  stratum  to  the  top  stratum 
of  the  trading  and  manufacturing  world. 
There  are  buried  seeds  in  it,  often  of  rare  and 
splendid  kinds,  which  only  crisis  brings  to 
life,  as  in  the  Boer  War.  And  the  keen  cult 
of  family  and  inheritance  implies,  after  all, 
something  valuable  in  a  world  that  has  lately 
grown  so  poor  in  cults." 

So  moralises  one  of  3  minor  characters 
in  this  novel  who  is  cast  Lhe  part  of  an 
intelligent  looker-on.  This  forecast,  taken 
in  connection  with  the  rest  of  the  book,  has 
an  interest  because  it  bears  on  the  only 
b  113 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


occasion  when  Mrs  Ward,  so  far  as  the  world 
knows,  took  a  definite  part  in  politics.  At 
the  General  Election  of  December,  1910,  she 
published  a  pamphlet  called  Letters  to  My 
Neighbours  on  the  Present  Election,  dealing 
with  the  main  issue  of  that  election — the 
continuance  or  limitation  of  the  powers  and 
privileges  possessed  by  the  "  rich,  leisurely 
and  aristocratic  class."  In  supporting  the 
continuance  of  these  things  she  based  her 
argument  largely  on  the  good  which  English 
landlords  had  done — on  the  superiority  of 
the  "  closed  "  village,  belonging  to  a  great 
landed  estate,  over  the  "  open ':  village, 
where  the  houses  belong  to  small  owners. 
Incidentally  the  pamphlet  reveals  that  as 
part  of  her  studies  for  Marcella  she  read 
through  the  Agricultural  Reports  of  the 
Grand  Commission  on  Labour — a  fact  very 
typical  of  her  methods  as  a  novelist.  But 
the  point  to  observe  is  that,  whereasin 
Marcella  and  other  books  we  have  much 
about  the  evils  that  grow  up  under  a  bad 
landlord,  here  in  The  Coryston  Family  there 
is  a  strong  suggestion  of  the  tyranny  which 

114 


LATER  NOVELS 


may  be  exercised,  from  the  most  conscien- 
tious motives,  on  a  well-managed  estate. 

Partly,  one  may  suppose  that  Mrs  Ward, 
concerned  to  interpret  the  England  of  her 
day,  has  been  confronted  with  the  fact  that 
the  election  of  1910  went  strongly  against 
her  view :  that  there  was  no  mistaking  the 
widespread  dislike  in  England  for  these 
hereditary  powers.  Asking  herself  the 
reason,  she  has  found  it  in  the  action  of  bad 
landlords,  condemned  by  their  own  class, 
such  as  she  depicts  again  in  The  Mating  of 
Lydia.  But,  with  characteristic  fairness,  she 
sees  that  the  objection  goes  farther,  and  so 
we  have  her  recognition  that  such  conscien- 
tious tyranny  as  the  Newburys'  is  possible, 
and  even  probable.  To  this  she  links  on  a 
new  proposition — a  thesis  set  out  in  terror  em 
— which  can  be  plainly  traced  to  the  working 
of  her  mind  on  a  burning  political  question. 
Woman's  agitation  for  political  equality  has 
brought  Mrs  Ward  into  the  political  arena  as 
a  speaker  and  writer  strongly  opposed  to 
woman's  political  claim;  and  this  novel 
points  to  a  recognition  by  her  of  a  want  of 

115 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


logic  in  the  position  of  many  women  who 
oppose  women's  suffrage.  Mrs  Ward  sees 
that  politicians  who  encourage  women  to 
organise  themselves  for  political  purposes, 
whether  in  the  Primrose  League  or  in 
similar  associations,  cannot  consistently 
resist  the  plea  that  women  should  be  allowed 
to  vote.  The  conclusion,  very  unmistakably 
put  in  The  Coryston  Family,  is  that  her  sex 
should  keep  out  of  politics  altogether ;  that 
they  spoil  themselves,  acd  spoil  political  life, 
by  deserting  their  true  place.  Coryston,  the 
Radical,  is  made  to  say : 

"  But  the  women — oughtn't  they  to  be  in 
the  shrine,  tending  the  mystic  fire  ?  What 
if  the  fire  goes  out — if  the  heart  of  the 
nation  dies  ?  " 

Lady  Coryston  loses  touch  with  her 
children,  loses  their  confidence  and  their 
affection,  because  she  throws  herself  into 
the  "  dusty  business ':  of  politics,  with  a 
vehemence  beyond  that  of  men.  Good  men 
have  often  been  tyrants  at  the  bidding  of  a 
creed.    Mrs  Ward  sets  up  Lady  Coryston  as 

116 


LATEK  NOVELS 


an  awful  example  to  show  that,  because 
"  women  are  so  unmeasured,"  they  will  act 
from  a  political  creed  as  men  have  acted 
under  the  ardent  stimulus  of  religion ;  and 
that  there  will  be  more  tyranny  instead  of 
less,  and  consequently  more  peril  to  the 
landlord  class. 

It  is  unnecessary  and  it  would  be  scarcely 
critical  to  pursue  farther  the  review  of  Mrs 
Ward's  writings.  She  has  published  several 
books  since  the  war,  and  they  do  her  no 
justice.  One,  Lady  Connie,  an  affectionate 
attempt  to  revive  the  Oxford  of  her  young 
life,  is  not  better  than  Miss  Bretherton.  The 
lack  of  concentration,  natural  in  time  of 
war  with  a  novelist  who  is  so  much  a  citizen, 
has  affected  not  only  her  creative  power 
but  her  normal  and  very  capable  technique. 
Yet  at  her  best  her  technique  has  never 
been  more  than  competent.  Her  writing, 
good  as  it  is,  lacks  personality.  It  would  be 
hard  to  swear  to  a  page  of  Mrs  Ward.  I  do 
not  know  but  the  same  holds  of  George  Eliot 
— the  novelist  whom  she  most  resembles — 
but  the  comparison  is  not  fair.    Everybody 

117 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 

knows  that  George  Eliot  had  humour  and 
had  passion,  superadded  to  the  mental 
attainments  which  she  shares  with  Mrs 
Ward.  What  discriminates  her  from  Mrs 
Ward  is  what  places  her  among  the  im- 
mortals. To  try  a  more  adequate  com- 
parison, Mrs  Oliphant  too  had  humour,  and 
also  had  charm ;  yet  I  think  that  Mrs  Ward's 
intellectual  range,  her  real  grip  of  struggles 
that  involve  the  intellect,  go  far  to  compen- 
sate for  her  lack  of  those  graces.  And  while 
Mrs  Oliphant,  poor  soul !  wrote  her  ringers 
literally  to  the  bone,  pouring  out  copy  with 
undiscriminating  profusion,  Mrs  Ward  has 
been  the  careful  stewardess  of  her  own 
talent ;  she  has  evidently  laboured  to  make 
each  book  complete  to  the  utmost  of  her 
ability.  She  seems  to  have  everything  that 
can  be  acquired  by  study — including  the 
technical  accomplishment  of  bringing 
singularly  untractable  matter  into  a  story. 
I  fear  that  the  qualities  which  she  lacks  are 
qualities  necessary  to  survival — the  salt  of 
humour,  the  fire  of  passion,  the  personal 
charm  of  a  style. 

118 


LATER  NOVELS 


Yet  in  any  review  of  our  period  in  litera- 
ture Mrs  Ward's  name  must  always  occupy 
considerable  space.  Future  criticism  will 
not  overlook  the  fact  that  she  almost  alone 
of  her  contemporaries  avoided  dealing  in  the 
crudities  of  passion  and  won  her  popularity 
by  a  singularly  austere  appeal ;  addressing 
herself  not  to  the  senses  or  the  simpler  feel- 
ings, but  to  those  emotions  which  connect 
themselves  with  high  and  often  abstract 
intellectual  interests.  There  is  no  mistaking 
her  honest  and  well-nourished  public  spirit, 
no  ignoring  her  services  as  a  good  citizen. 
Yet,  while  a  book  like  Beauchamp 's  Career 
braces  the  tone  of  those  who  read,  and  puts 
life  into  the  ideals  of  good  citizenship, 
Meredith  makes  these  effects,  as  it  were, 
unconsciously  and  by  the  mere  contagion 
of  his  presence.  He  writes  for  the  sake  of 
embodying  a  number  of  characters  working 
themselves  out  in  mutual  relations ;  and  his 
creative  impulse  is  the  artist's  pure  and 
simple.  I  am  sure  Mrs  Ward  enjoys  writing 
her  novels.  But  the  pleasure  which  I  feel 
in  them  and  behind  them  is  the  publicist's 

119 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


who  has  discovered  a  subtle  device  through 
which  argument  can  be  conducted  under 
special  forms.  She  fails,  I  think,  in  the  last 
resort,  not  because  she  is  too  much  of  the 
good  citizen,  but  because  she  is  too  little 
of  an  artist.  She  would  sooner  found  an 
influential  sect  than  write  a  supremely  good 
book.  This  is  a  perfectly  natural  ambition, 
but  one  incompatible  with  the  highest 
literary  success. 


120 


A  SHOET  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  MRS 
HUMPHRY  WARD'S  PRINCI- 
PAL WORKS 

[The  date  is  given  of  the  first  edition  of  each  book ;  later 
editions  and  cheap  reissues  are  not  noted  in  this  list.] 

Milly  and  Oily :   a   Holiday  among  the   Mountains   (Mac- 

millan).     1881. 
Miss  Bretherton  (Macmillan).     1884. 
Robert  Elsmere  (Smith,  Elder).     3  vols.      1888. 
Address  to  mark  the  Opening  of  University  Hall  [Pamphlet] 

(Smith,  Meier).     1891. 
The  History  of  David  Grieve  (Smith,  Elder).     3  vols.     1892. 
Unitarians  and   the   Future  :   Essex   Hall  Lecture  (Green). 

1894. 
Marcella  (Smith,  Elder).     3  vols.     1894. 
The  Story  of  Bessie  Costrell  (Smith,  Elder).     1895. 
Sir  George  Tressady  (Smith,  Elder).     1896. 
Helbeck  of  Bannisdale  (Smith,  Elder).     1898. 
Eleanor  (Smith,  Elder).     1900. 
Lady  Rose's  Daughter  (Smith,  Elder).     1903. 
The  Marriage  of  William  Ashe  (Smith,  Elder).     1905. 
The  Play-time  of  the  Poor  [Pamphlet]  (Smith,  Elder).    1906. 
Fenwick's  Career  (Smith,  Elder).     1906. 
William    Thomas    Arnold,    Journalist    and    Historian.     By 

Mrs  Humphry  Ward  and  C.  E.  Montague  (Manchester : 

University  Press).     1907. 
Diana  Mallory  (  Smith,  Elder).     1908. 
Daphne  ;  or  "Marriage  a  la  Mode "  (Cassell).     1909. 
Canadian  Born  (Smith,  Elder).     1910. 

121 


MES  HUMPHRY  WARD 


Letters  to  my  Neighbour  on  the  Present  Election  [Pamphlet] 

(Smith,  Elder).     1910. 
The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell  {Smith,  Elder).     1911. 
The  Mating  of  Lydia  (Smith,  Elder).     1913. 
The  Coryston  Family  (Smith,  Elder).     1913. 
Delia  Blanchflower  (  Ward,  Lock).     1915. 
Eltham  House  (Cassell).     1915. 
A  Great  Success  (Smith,  Elder).     1916. 
England's  Effort  (Smith,  Elder).     1916. 
Lady  Connie  (Smith,  Elder).     1916. 

COLLECTED  EDITION 

Westmoreland  Edition.  The  Writings  of  Mrs  Humphry 
Ward,  with  introductions  by  the  Author.  Limited  to 
250  copies  (Smith,  Elder).     1911-1912. 

1,2.  Robert  El  smere.  3,4.  The  History  of  David  Grieve. 
5,  6.  Marcella.  7.  Sir  George  Tressady.  8.  Sir  George 
Tressady  (Conclusion)  ;  Miss  Bretherton.  9.  Helbeck  of 
Bannisdale.  10.  Eleanor.  11.  Lady  Rose's  Daughter. 
12.  The  Marriage  of  William  Ashe.  13.  Fenwick's  Career  ; 
The  Story  of  Bessie  Costrell.  14.  The  Testing  of  Diana 
Mallory.  15.  Daphne  (Marriage  a  la  Mode)  ;  Canadian  Born 
(Lady  Merton,  Colonist).     16.  The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell. 


122 


AMERICAN  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Milly  and  Oily :  or  a  Holiday  among  the  Mountains  (Mac- 

millan).     1881.     Revised  edition  (Doubleday).     1907. 
Miss  Bretherton  {Macmillan).     1885. 
Robert  Elsmere  {Macmillan).     2  vols.     1888. 
-— *  University  Hall  Opening  Address  [Pamphlet]  {Macmillan) 

1891. 

The  History  of  David  Grieve  (Macmillan).     2  vols.     1892. 

Marcella  (Macmillan).     2  vols.     1894. 

The  Story  of  Bessie  Costrell  (Macmillan).     1895. 

Sir  George  Tressady  (Macmillan).     2  vols.     1896. 

Helbeck  of  Bannisdale  (Macmillan).     2  vols.     1898. 

New  Forms  of  Christian  Education :  Address  to  the  Uni- 
versity Hall  Guild  [Pamphlet]  (Crowell).     n.d.  [1898]. 

Eleanor  (Harper).     1900. 

Lady  Rose's  Daughter  (Harper).     1903. 

The  Marriage  of  William  Ashe  (Harper).     1905. 

Fenwick's  Career  (Harper).     1906. 

William  Thomas  Arnold,  Journalist  and  Historian.  By 
Mrs  Humphry  Ward  and   C.   E.  Montague  (Harper). 

1907. 
The  Testing  of  Diana  Mallory  (Harper).     1908. 
Marriage  a  la  Mode  (Doubleday).     1909. 
Lady  Merton,  Colonist  (Doubleday).     1910. 
The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell  (Doubleday).     1911. 
The  Mating  of  Lydia  (Doubleday).     1911. 
The  Coryston  Family.     A  Novel  (Harper).     1913. 
Delia  Blanchflower  (Hearst).     1914. 
Eltham  House  (Hearst).     1915. 
A  Great  Success  (Hearst).     1916. 

123 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


England's  Effort  (Scribners).     1916. 
Lady  Connie  (Hearst).      1916. 

The  Westmoreland  Edition  of  the  Writings  of  Mrs 
Humphry  Ward  is  published  in  America  by  Houghton 
Mifflin  &  Co. 


124 


INDEX 

Amiel's  Journal  Intlme,  14 
Anderson,  Mary,  17 
Arnold,  T.  K.,  13,  34 
Arnold,  Matthew,  13 
.Arnold,  Prof.  T.,  13 

Bennett,  Arnold,  57 
Byron,  85 

Canadian  Born,  18 

Case  of  Richard  Meynell,  The,  34,  98,  99,  101.  103 

Catholicism,  63,  64,  67 

Church  of  England,  102 

Crawford,  Marion,  79 

Culture,  55 

Dales,  the,  68 

Daphne,  95 

David  Grieve,  66 

Davidson,  Dr  Randall,  32 

de  l'Espinasse,  Mademoiselle,  83 

Diana  Mallory,  89 

Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography,  24 

Dilke,  Lady,  26 

Eleanor,  76,  79 

Eliot,  George,  117,  118 

125 


MRS  HUMPHRY  WARD 


* 


Faculty  of  Invention,  39 
Fenwick's  Career,  87,  89 
Forster,  Arnold,  15 
Forster,  W.  E.,  15 

General  Election,  114 
Gladstone,  W.  E.,  30,  86 
Green,  T.  H.,  30 

Hamilton,  Lady,  87 
Helbeck  of  Bannisdale,  61,  76 
History  of  David  Grieve,  The,  35 
Howells,  W.  D.,  57 

Italy,  78,  79 

Jowett,  B.,  14 

Lady  Connie,  117 

Lady  Hose's  Daughter,  83 

Lamb,  Lady  Caroline,  85 

Landlords,  113.  114 

Letters  to  My  Neighbours  on  the  Present  Election,  114 

Liddon,  Canon,  14 

Marcella,  42,  51 

Marriage  of  William  Ashe,  The,  84 

Mating  of  Lydia,  The,  103,  115 

Maybrick  Case,  the,  94 

Melbourne,  Lord,  86 

Meredith,  G.,  13 

MeVimee,  Prosper,  79 

Miss  Bretherton,  17,  19,  117 

Modernist  Movement,  102 

126 


INDEX 


Nettleship,  R.  L.,  30 

Newman,  13 

New  Reformation,  The,  33 

Oliphant,  Mrs,  118 
Oxford,  56,  117 

Pattison,  Mark,  14,  26 
Pusey,  Dr,  14 

Hubert  Elsmere,  Chapter  II.  and  passim 

Romney,  George,  87 

Russell  of  Killowen,  Lord,  94 

Stevenson,  13 

Story  of  Bessie  Costrell,  The,  39 

Tolstoi,  59 

Tressady,  Sir  George,  38 

Trollope,  10,  12 

Unbelief  and  Sin,  29 

Wace,  Dr,  24 
Westcott,  32,  33 
Westmoreland  Edition,  24,  96 
Women's  Suffrage,  116 
Wordsworth,  21,  27 

Yonge,  Charlotte,  12 


127 


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